


Funeral Games

by Greekhoop



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Complete, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Long, M/M, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:46:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 113,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7145219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greekhoop/pseuds/Greekhoop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jake and Sherry learn that domestic bliss doesn't really suit them. Obsessed with uncovering the circumstances behind his father's death, Jake finds out more about Wesker than he ever wanted to. Meanwhile, Sherry gets a tip from a mysterious source and conducts an investigation of her own at an abandoned Siberian missile base.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I finally decided to copy this over here from the Other Place. Sorry if you see it twice.

Nothing beat waking up in the hospital for crushing a man’s budding delusions of grandeur. Jake learned that the hard way in Minsk, six months after the first time he saved the world.

It happened after they’d finished clearing out the last nest of Plagas in one of the crumbling apartment blocks below the river. The technology behind the Plagas was so out of date at this point that it was practically retro, like bringing an eight track player to a gun fight. Even the locals who had hired them had seemed apologetic about it.

The whole thing was a pretty pathetic skirmish, not even worth getting all dressed up for. Jake cut the locals a decent discount for his services, and he set most of the cash aside for getting good and drunk.

He remembered feeling competent, cocky, immortal. Other people could die, he figured, and indeed they might do so all the time, but not him. Nothing could even touch him.

That was what he was thinking right up until the moment that his motorcycle skidded on a patch of ice, and he went over the handlebars. And then nothing until he woke up in the hospital with a crude horseshoe shaved out of his hair and a row of stitches running from his eyebrow to his crown.

He was fine, more or less – it was just a concussion – but there was nothing like taking out a dozen Plagas bare-knuckled only to wipe out on a patch of ice no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper to make you realize what a crapshoot life and death was. Laid up in a Belorussian clinic, the left side of his head throbbing like it was going to push his eye right out of his skull, Jake began to wonder how it could be that his father alone had managed to miss that simple, inescapable fact.

Since he’d found out the truth, Jake had caught himself thinking about his old man more and more. It had been like that when he was younger, when he had first realized that there was something in his mother’s past, something she never talked about, something that had trickled down into him. When they were on good terms, which they usually were, Jake assumed that his father had skipped out on them, or, at best, that he was dead. When they fought, his internal narrative revised itself and it was his mother who had callously driven a good and decent man away.

She never knew that he had thought this; at least, he hoped she hadn’t. Jake never asked her anything, not even a name. Because he had learned how to walk before he could crawl, and how to throw a punch before he could read, and how to take a fucking hint before he could give one.

It wasn’t until she was dead and gone that he had finally realized he even had the words to say that he hated his father. Running with mercenaries was kind of like being at ground zero for daddy issues, and the first time he heard one of the older guys shooting his mouth off about what a sack of shit his own father had been, Jake had actually laughed. That small pitiful sound, rusty from years of disuse, was like a revelation. It was all it took for the little Dutch boy to pop his finger out of the dam and release a whole torrent of toxic pent-up hate.

Hate was good, it was progress. But hate had appetites. For five years, Jake had soothed himself with sex, alcohol, food, drugs, cards, dice, and fights. Any vice or poison he came across, down the pipe it went.

Things had been going pretty well, at least in the sense that they could have been going much worse. And then Albert Wesker had to go and ruin it.

The name hadn’t meant anything to Jake the first time he’d heard it. Most of Wesker’s movements and dealings, he found out later, were classified during his life. The name was just a collection of syllables back then, sounds drifting in a void, occasionally knocking into one another with dull clunks. It was the fact that his father had a name at all, an identity outside of his utter lack of identity, that had pulled Jake up short.

He felt that he had been adrift for years on a vast and featureless sea, and when that name had appeared it had been like a barren rock rising out of the waves. Dry land at last for him to throw himself upon.

Jake had never intended to find out more than just that name. The things Carla had hinted at, the little scraps of information that she had dangled before him, he didn’t want to hear anything else like that. He didn’t want to know if knowing was just going to be embarrassing for him, or difficult. But after five years of indulging every whim that popped into his head, one thing that Jake didn’t have in abundance was self-control.

At first, he’d been satisfied with just pictures. There weren’t a lot of photographs of his father still floating around unclassified, but he did come across a few. One very old one from when Wesker had first joined Umbrella as a researcher showed a thin, awkward teenager with sunglasses perched on top of his head, younger then than Jake was now, somewhat ferret-faced as if he was still growing into his features.

Wesker had been facing the camera but not looking into it. His eyes were fixed on a spot somewhere beyond.

Jake was annoyed at the implication that he had anything in common, even on the genetic level, with this twerpy little nerd, this poindexter who looked like he jerked off to Pokemon or something in his spare time.  His hands would have been soft, Jake remembered thinking with a shudder that was half of revulsion and half of anger, because he had never had to put them to any kind of serious work. He’d just coasted along: nursery to prep school to science camp to a cushy job at daddy’s company.

What an asshole. He probably thought he’d actually earned it.

It would have been better, Jake knew now, if he had just left the whole thing alone. He could have come away with that image of his father affixed firmly in his mind: a young man, wide-eyed, still blinking, as if he had been suddenly and roughly shoved out of the cellar where he had spent the first seventeen years of his life, into the full and unmerciful light of day.

By his third day in the hospital, Jake could tell they were thinking about unceremoniously throwing him out. The gash on his head had pretty well healed up, and lights no longer hovered on the fringes of his sight. He could eat the kasha they brought him at mealtimes and actually keep it down. Still, Jake wasn’t in any hurry to leave, and as long as they didn’t need the bed for some other poor basketcase, he wasn’t going to rush things along if he could help it.

It was nice, he thought, being laid up like this. He had a roommate, but the guy was in for a broken jaw and couldn’t have said a word if he had wanted to. When Jake heard him get up and shuffle out from behind the threadbare curtain that split their room in two, he turned on his side and closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep until his roommate had gotten back from taking a piss or stocking up on painkillers or whatever. Jake had never actually laid eyes on the man, and that was the way he preferred it.

There was nothing else to do but lay there and think. He thought about a few different things, but mostly about his father, and how he had definitely never been stuck in a hospital with a crumbling Soviet exterior and bright, clean, brand new interior. How he’d never had a wedge shaved impersonally out of his immaculate hair, and a row of neat, black stitches like a column of marching ants put in its place.

He used to dwell on the idea that Wesker had gotten all the luck. Now he was beginning to think that maybe he had gotten none of it.

Jake couldn’t decide if that little revelation was genuine progress or just sour grapes. Or maybe it was just a bit of rhetorical nonsense born out of feeling cooped up and bored with no one to talk to. All at once, with no real build up at all, he realized he missed Sherry awfully.

It had been half a year since he had last seen her, and almost that long since he had really given the time they’d spent together much thought. It had only been a few days cumulatively, and with everything that had been going on it wasn’t as if they’d had much time to get to know each other. Still, Jake felt that he understood her on an intimate level, the same way he might flip on the radio and hear a song and feel that the singer knew him perfectly, without ever even knowing his name.

Jake liked to imagine that she was on vacation somewhere warm. Somewhere with a beach, maybe on the Mediterranean, where the girls sunbathed topless. Not that Sherry would do anything like that, but she might think about it. She only wore one-piece bathing suits, Jake decided. Modest, but not too covered up. She always wore sunscreen, putting it on every six hours like clockwork. She spread out a big towel on the sand and read a book by the ocean, totally absorbed in the story, her expression shifting unconsciously with each twist in the narrative.

He got so wrapped up thinking about it that when Sherry actually did show up at his bedside on the gray and dismal morning of his fourth day in the hospital, Jake was momentarily baffled as to how she managed to be in two places at once.

“Long time no see,” Sherry said. She smiled shyly, as if to apologize for intruding.

Jake was still trying to get his shit together. He sat up in bed, running his palms over his clothes in a vain attempt to smooth out the wrinkles. The dingy hospital sheets made him feel self-conscious so he pushed them off. Then, feeling exposed, he pulled them back.

“Is something wrong?” It wasn’t what he had wanted to say, but it was what came out.

Sherry’s mouth contracted into a frown. She looked great, Jake decided, but a little pale. There hadn’t been any Mediterranean beach in her recent past. If the shadows under her eyes were any indication, she’d been soaking up the glow from a computer monitor instead of the sun.

“What do you mean?” she said quietly.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Jake said. “It’s nice to see you and everything. But the last time you showed up out of nowhere it was because the world was going to hell.”

“No, it’s nothing like that.” She was blushing, but so far she seemed unaware of that fact. “One of our agents filed a report about what happened to you. I came to see if you need anything?”

Jake dipped his head, trying to catch her eye, but she seemed pretty intent on avoiding his gaze. It was a little unsettling. “In a professional capacity?” he said.

“Not completely.” Sherry’s blush deepened, and all at once she seemed to realize it was there. Her hand flew up to the bridge of her nose, scrubbing at the pink skin.

“Fine,” Jake said. “So it’s not _Return of the Living Dead_. That’s good. But something sure has you all worked up.”

All at once, she dropped her hand back to her side. Then she lifted her eyes and looked right at him. The blush was still there, but she didn’t look timid anymore. “I’m not ready to talk about that yet,” she said firmly. “Not here.”

“You have somewhere else in mind?”

“Back home,” Sherry said. She unclasped her black pocketbook and took out a neat, sealed envelope. “I have your plane ticket here. The visa is taken care of, too. I had to pull a few strings, but it helps if you know the right people.”


	2. Chapter 2

When Jake got back from the gym, after he had showered and changed and tossed his sweat-soaked workout clothes into the laundry hamper, he started dinner. He did it mechanically, moving from the bedroom to the kitchen without checking the time, without even thinking that it was getting late.

His life had become automatic.

He wouldn’t say it was routine. No, it wasn’t exactly that. It was more like practicing a one-two punch on the heavy bag for so long that the next time some meathead lunged at you, you dropped him just like that, without even knowing that you were going to do it until it was done.

But even that was not a perfect comparison, Jake thought as he stood in front of the open refrigerator, scrutinizing its contents. He already knew what was there. Years spent living hand to mouth had made him meticulous and fussy about food. Even without looking he knew exactly what they had, right down to the last cold cut and fuzzed-over plastic container of leftovers.

All the same, this wasn’t a matter of life or death, not like war, or like knocking some big oaf flat on his ass. It was just dinner, which Jake tried to have ready right at 7:31. That was when Sherry would walk through the door, unless she had missed her train again, and she’d be hungry, because she had probably worked through lunch again.

Jake didn’t go around trying to pass himself off as enlightened or anything because he stayed home while Sherry worked. After the thing in China, she’d been transferred to a desk job, and the paycheck she brought home was plenty to support both of them. Jake, who had never been much good at anything but cracking heads, didn’t really see the point in going out and trying to make nice in the post-employment economy when he didn’t have to.

He stayed home. Cleaned, cooked, ran errands, hit the gym five days a week. A lot of times when he was out during the day, he’d see some young guy in a suit, a guy about his age, with a phone glued to his ear and a surge in his stride and a shrewd and starving look on his face.

Thank god that’s not me, Jake always told himself, as a black barb of jealousy lodged itself a little deeper in his heart.

He took some hamburger that had been thawing out of the fridge, then added a red onion, a couple of potatoes, and some mushrooms that looked like they were about to go bad to his little pile of supplies on the counter. Jake’s mother had taught him how to make pirogues when he was still a kid. They’d never really gotten enough to eat back in those days, but when you chopped everything up and mixed it with enough cheap starch, sometimes you actually felt full for a few minutes afterwards.

Anyway, Sherry seemed to like them pretty well.

Jake got out a knife and started to mince the onion in neat, unhurried strokes. He had checked out again, and he was moving without even being conscious of what he was doing. His hand did not need to be told to bring the knife down, to scrape the chopped onions off the cutting board and into a mixing bowl when he was finished.

It wasn’t that he was distracted, or deep in thought. In fact he wasn’t really thinking about anything at all. Occasionally, a few lines of an old conversation, a few bars or a song he had heard once, would pass through his mind. That was all, though.

He finished cutting up the vegetables and turned around to rinse the knife in the sink. All at once, an image of his father’s face came untethered from some place in the depths of his subconscious and floated up to flash briefly before his eyes.

Jake stopped what he was doing. He looked down at his hands. One was on the hilt of the knife, and the other held a dishtowel which he was using to dry the blade. For a single horrible instant, he had no idea where he was, or why, or even how he had gotten here.

Carefully, he set the knife down on the counter, then he planted both palms in the edge of the sink. His eyes drifted out of focus, staring off into the middle distance. This time, though, his mind wasn’t wandering. The gears were turning up there, all to some definite purpose.

He tried to picture his father’s face. What came to mind was not the self-assured and imposing figure that Wesker had cut in the years leading up to his death, but instead only the twitchy and perpetually startled-looking kid he had been at seventeen. If he walked through the door right now, Jake thought, they would have nothing to say to each other. He would have no way to explain to that man he had always hated why he was cooped up in some mid-market condo outside Washington, DC, making dinner, picking up the dry cleaning, going to the supermarket, being utterly unremarkable in every way.

When he did hear the front door open, Jake jumped about a mile. For a second, he really was convinced that somehow his father had clawed his way out of hell just so he could let Jake know how disappointed he was in him. Any moment now he would start down the hall, his Calvin Klein suit matted with the dirt of the grave, dragging his spectral chains behind him…

“Hello?” Sherry called from the foyer. Her voice dragged him roughly back to reality.

Sheepishly, Jake looked around the kitchen, remembering the half-made pirogues sitting forgotten on the counter. He sucked in a deep breath. “In here, babe,” he called back. He had wanted it to sound careless, casual, like there was nothing to see here. He didn’t think he had pulled it off.

Sherry came down the hall and poked her head into the kitchen. “Something smells good,” she said, and smiled. Jake hadn’t started cooking yet so there wasn’t anything, good or bad, for her to have smelled. Still, she said it every night and there was no reason for her to stop now.

“Give me a half hour,” Jake said. “I got tied up at the gym. You’re not starving are you?”

Sherry shook her head. “I’m okay.”

She padded across the kitchen floor in her stocking feet. They’d made it through the fall together, and the winter, and now it was spring, which meant that the roads were grimy with melting snow. Sherry had a very strict policy about tracking mud into the house, and she always left her shoes by the door. Jake liked seeing her off in the morning, liked when she crouched down to zip up her high heeled boots, when she straightened up again, and with the four-inch boost to her height they could suddenly look each other in the eye.

Without those boots, though, Jake had to bend down so that she could kiss him. She did it quickly, brushing her lips over the corner of his mouth, and then she smiled, though her eyes were tense.

“You’re too wonderful,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Sherry looked at him for a second, like she was waiting for something, then she turned on her heels and went silently out.

It was only after she was gone that Jake realized he probably should have said something just then. Something nice, to make her feel good. He looked down at the half-made meal spread out on the counter, the dough webbing his fingers, the flour dusting the front of his shirt. It would have to do in a pinch, he decided. He’d always been good at doing things that needed to get done, and bad at saying things that needed to get said.

He heard the shower come on in the bathroom, a dull rattle reverberating through the thin walls of the condo.

Sherry still didn’t know how much he had loathed the idea of moving in with her when she had first brought it up, how much the suggestion had almost sent him running right back to the warm embrace of being a gun for hire. He’d still been mulling over how to tell her when she had showed up in the living room where he was bunking up on the sofa one night and crawled in under the blankets with him.

They’d fooled around for a while without really making much headway. It wasn’t that Jake didn’t know his way around a warm body, and, just like with all their dealings together, Sherry didn’t have any trouble keeping pace with him. But trying to hook up with someone you actually liked, Jake soon discovered, was like trying to unlearn years of bad technique.

Eventually, he tried to turn over on top of her and only managed to roll them right off the couch.

Laying there in the blue light of the muted television, half covered by the blankets they had dragged after them, with one of Sherry’s sharp little hipbones digging into his stomach, Jake started to laugh. Sherry didn’t ask him why. She didn’t want to know what was so funny. She just looked at him perplexed for a moment, and then she laughed a little too.

Squirming out from under him, she offered her hand. They went back to her bedroom together, and Jake spooned up against her back and fell asleep almost immediately, to hell with the boner awkwardly tenting the front of his underwear.

It wasn’t until he woke up the next morning that he realized he had all but agreed to stay. He could have kicked himself for that one. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Sherry; he just wasn’t quite sure he liked her more than he liked his freedom.

He shouldn’t have worried. Jake didn’t know what he had expected exactly, but in truth he hardly saw Sherry at all these days. A few hours in the evening when she was too exhausted from a day at the office to really carry on a conversation; two days on the weekends when they slept late together and then shuffled around the house cleaning the windows and vacuuming.

For the most part, Jake was alone. He was used to it. Being alone had always suited him just fine. But it seemed kind of a waste now, kind of sad in a way he wasn’t sure he’d be able to articulate.

When he’d finished rolling out the dough for pirogues, Jake wrapped it up into a cylinder. He cut a slice from one end, flattened it out into a little pancake in the palm of his hand, and spooned some of the meat into the middle.  Then he folded one end over and pleated the edges of the dough, making little folds and then tucking them under, sealing up the edge of the dumpling.

The whole process had only taken a few seconds. When Sherry had seen him do it for the first time, she had called him an artist. Jake supposed that there was something aesthetically pleasing about creating that perfect seam, but it wasn’t like he was doing it to impress anybody. Hell, the damn things just fell all to pieces unless you got them exactly right the first time.

As he started in on the second pirogue, Jake realized that he hadn’t thought about his father once in almost ten whole minutes. He was about to break out the tickertape parade for that little achievement, when all at once that old familiar face was dredged to the surface again.

That faded photo, that file degraded from years of being copied and recopied, had become his father’s death mask. In it, Wesker’s eyes had been hungry. He’d wanted something back then. Whatever else he had done, who could blame him for that? Who could get mad at someone just for wanting?

After a while, Sherry came out of the bathroom. Her hair was damp from the shower and she was dressed in a little pair of cotton shorts and a tank top. Jake wondered if he’d put them on for him. She sure looked like a million bucks.

“How was work?” Jake said as he started to cut up some stuff to make a salad.

“Same as always,” Sherry said. “We’re drafting a proposal for submission to the DOD. Once it goes through, we’ll have access to the old Umbrella Corporation spy satellites.”

That name – Umbrella – was like a sudden weight dropped into the pit of his stomach. Jake felt the little hairs on the back of his neck rise, but he managed to keep his voice pretty casual. “You sure that’s such a good idea?”

“Someone might as well get some use out of them,” Sherry said. “They’re just sitting up there rusting. Do things rust in space?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said.

“I’ll look it up.” Sherry slid her phone out of the waistband of those little shorts. While she pulled up Google and typed with one hand, she got a couple of beers out of the fridge with the other.

“It says that metal can’t rust without oxygen, but exposure to ultraviolet light can trigger a similar process.”

“Cool,” Jake said.

“Yeah.” She nudged the cold side of one of the beer bottles against his wrist, and Jake took it and had a long swallow. When he went back to folding the last of the pirogues, Sherry leaned against the counter watching him.

“You have beautiful hands,” she said quietly.

“And you’ve got great tits, but I’m not allowed to stare at those.”

Sherry kicked him in the ankle for that one. She was just playing around, but it was still hard enough to hurt a little.

“Does it really bother you that we’re going to use those satellites?” Sherry asked.

“It bothers me that they’re up there at all more than it bothers me that you’re going to have access to them,” Jake said. He finished up the last pirogue placed it on the steamer. “It all seems kind of… you know.”

“You make it sound like I’m doing something wrong.”

“It’s not that. I just think that, if it were me, I’d want to leave those old dead things alone.”

“Now you sound superstitious.” Sherry took a drink of beer, but not so quickly that she managed hide the grin that flashed across her face.

 

“I guess I do. It doesn’t really matter how I sound, though. You’ll do just what you want.”

Sherry slowly lowered the beer bottle. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Jake knew that he had said the wrong thing, that what he had meant to say had come out in the worst possible way.

“Because you know what’s best,” he amended quickly. “Now, grab a couple of plates. These are just about ready to eat.”

***

After dinner, Sherry did the dishes and then came out to curl up on the couch and get a movie from Netflix. She stretched out with her legs in Jake’s lap, which was just fine by him. About twenty minutes in, when it became pretty clear that the movie wasn’t going anywhere interesting, Jake slipped a hand under the blanket and began to stroke her calf.

She sighed and arched back against him. Encouraged, he went on, cupping his hand around one of her knees. Her skin was soft; every time he touched her he was surprised by how soft she really was. Though she was small, she wasn’t slight. That always surprised him too, that she was a creature of real weight and substance. He had gotten used to translucent girls, there with him in form but already halfway out the door.

Jake moved his hand up over the bulge of her thigh. He was trying to go slow, as slow as he could, dragging it out to tease her a little. Sherry didn’t seem to be taking the bait, though. When Jake glanced towards her face, he found it turned away from him, facing the television. In the glow from the screen, the tips of her blonde hair looked blue.

When his hand reached the taut little tendon on the inside of her thigh, he expected her to flinch. It wasn’t, Jake was all but positive, that she didn’t like it when he touched her. But she still tensed up in a kind of shivery, nervous anticipation when things started to get hot and heavy. At first, Jake had thought it was because he was doing something wrong. But Sherry had never mentioned anything, and she didn’t seem like the type to keep quiet to preserve a guy’s feelings. Besides, Jake wasn’t about to sprinkle a hundred rose petals all over the bed or anything like that, but he knew that he had some pretty good moves where it counted.

Tonight, however, that nervous little twitch, that winding up of muscle under his hand never came. Maybe, he thought, Sherry was finally getting over her honeymoon jitters. He stretched out two fingers, sliding them under the hem of her shorts until he felt a fringe of downy curls.

Sherry murmured softly and slowly raised her head, propping herself up on her elbow.

Jake frowned. “You fell asleep.”

“I was just resting my eyes.”

When Jake withdrew his fingers, Sherry sat up slowly to follow them. She swung one leg over his thighs so that she was kneeling across his lap. Her hair was tousled, eyes still half-closed.  Her lips twitched into a sleepy smile.

“What were you doing with your hand there?” she said.

“Looking for my keys.”

Sherry kissed him. Her lips moved slowly, still numb with sleep. “Did you find them?”

“No.” Jake stroked his hands along her sides, lifting her shirt. Then he felt it again, that subtle tensing of muscle, as if she were trying to pull away from him without actually moving.

“Take another look,” she said. “I’m positive they’re there.”

Jake sighed. “It’s okay, babe. I guess you had a long day. You should go to bed.”

“Are you sure?” Sherry said.

“Yeah, I’m sure. We’ll have all Saturday to fool around. And you can have all Sunday to walk around bowlegged like a cowboy.”

Sherry rolled her eyes as she climbed off his lap. “You always say the most romantic things, Jake.”

He watched her head back towards the bedroom. At the door, she glanced back at him. “Not coming?”

“I’m just going to finish the movie and then I’ll be along.” He glanced back at the screen. Things had changed, but he couldn’t say what. “We should get Hulu Plus or something.”

“Maybe when I get that promotion,” Sherry said, turning away again. “We’ll be able to afford it then.”


	3. Chapter 3

Jake slept late the next day, and he wasn’t up in time to see Sherry off to work. Her last words to him the night before kept running through his head. He couldn’t remember what he had asked for, but he remembered very clearly that she had told him they couldn’t afford it. Jake had heard that plenty of times, back in Edonia when he was growing up. Back then, it was just as likely that it would come after he’d asked for new shoes or schoolbooks, so hearing Sherry apply it to something inessential, something he’d only wanted for an instant, was almost a relief.

He knew that he and Sherry lived pretty comfortably, though he never had the pocket money to really go paint the town like he’d always come to expect after a successful mission. Still, he’d never had any reason to think that they might be short of funds.

Sherry would have told him. She wouldn’t have kept something like that to herself. Still, her words wouldn’t leave him alone.

He heard them while he watched his morning coffee drip down into the pot, while he sliced an apple and poured himself a bowl of cereal. While he took everything and sat down with it at the clean bright kitchen table. Then while he dipped his spoon into the bowl and let it fall against the edge, all but forgotten.

His thoughts drifted, following the echo of Sherry’s voice into the locked-away corners of his mind where he kept all those memories of his mother. At first she had forced herself not to cry in front of him when she told him that they had no money, then it seemed that she had lost the strength to hide her tears at all. Then, finally, near the end, she had stopped crying entirely, as if that great reservoir of misery inside of her had finally run dry.

It had always come back to money, Jake thought. And how some people had more than they could ever spend, but he had never been one of them.

The pounding of his own heart brought him back to his senses. Jake’s throat felt tight, and when he pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, he could feel that his pulse was racing. He had frightened himself, he realized, and he was embarrassed.

He looked down at the breakfast he had not touched. The coffee was cold, the apple brown, the cereal dissolved into amorphous sludge in the milk. God knew how long he had been sitting there like that, brooding over things he couldn’t change or help.

His appetite suddenly gone, Jake got up and scraped the remains of the cereal into the garbage disposal. Then he threw out the apple and tossed the coffee into the sink. In the living room, he found Sherry’s laptop resting again the side of the couch, and he turned it on.

There was no password. She had never tried to keep her computer private, but they had a kind of unspoken rule that he wasn’t supposed to use it. It wasn’t as if he was going to snoop through her emails or anything, Jake reasoned. He just wanted to get a better look at the bank account that was half his anyway.

When he opened up the spreadsheet software, he found the monthly budget right at the top of the recent documents. He expected to open it up and be confronted by columns of impenetrable numbers, but it was actually pretty easy to follow. Sherry was meticulously organized, and she kept painstaking records.

They had more expenses than he had thought. Some of them he knew about while others – the credit card payments, Sherry’s student loans – were like relics from a time before they had met.

At the bottom of the sheet, he found what he was looking for. The month before they had been $97 over budget. It was a tiny discrepancy, and one that had been easy to cover by putting a little less into savings, but Jake would have been lying if he said he didn’t feel a little shiver of anxiety at the sight of those red numbers.

He went back through the past few months. They were all the same. Each month they were a little in the red. Never more than a hundred dollars or so; never more than they could afford with a little creative juggling of funds. Regardless, Jake thought, the writing was on the wall. He was a burden on Sherry’s finances. It was taking care of his unemployed ass that put her in debt each month.

Slowly, he closed the laptop and put it away. Then he got up and wandered into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and looked at its contents, mentally cataloguing everything, reassuring himself that there really was enough to eat, that there always would be, that his lean and hungry days were behind him.

The compressor clicked on, reminding him of how much energy he was burning standing here like this, how much it was going to add to the bill at the end of the month. Guiltily, he closed the door.

He had to pull it together, he told himself. Thinking about the past, remembering all those things that should have stayed buried, wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He tried to recall what he had to do that afternoon, and he came up lacking. Usually, on a day off like this, he’d just watch some TV, read, maybe take a walk until it was time for the gym. But right now he felt like he couldn’t stomach any of that.

It would be hours before Sherry got home, but all at once Jake needed to hear her voice. He had to scrutinize the way she spoke, the expression on her face, for some reassurance that he was not a burden to her, and that she was not keeping him around out of pity.

Jake snatched up his phone and dialed her number. The phone rang and rang, until her voicemail picked up and Jake ended the call.

He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, clutching the phone in his numb hand until it buzzed with an incoming text from Sherry.

_In a meeting :P_ , the message read. _Talk tonight._

Jake read it over three times in rapid succession, as if he had suddenly lost the ability to comprehend the words.

He was embarrassed that he had called her like that, and he was glad that she had not answered. He wouldn’t have known what to say to her. It was shameful, he thought, that he had come this far, saved the world, stared down his death, punched his way out of a hundred tight spots, only to end up calling his girlfriend at work in the middle of the morning because he was having a mental shitfit about growing up poor.

That was all in the past. Just like his father was in the past, hired gun work was in the past, and goddamn BOWs were all in the past. There were more things in his past then there were in his future, and that was the way he wanted it.

Jake put his phone away and went back in the other room and turned on the TV. The condo suddenly seemed too quiet. He tried a bunch of different channels, but nothing seemed to fill the space. It was all static, meaningless noise.

He had to talk to someone, just to get his head straight, but he had no idea who he could get to listen. Jake fished out his phone and started scrolling through the contacts, hoping that inspiration would strike. Even after nearly six months in America, he only had about ten numbers saved and two of them were pizza delivery. He’d about dismissed as hopeless the idea of finding a sympathetic ear when he spotted Leon Kennedy’s name.

Jake had gotten to know Leon pretty well through Sherry. Though he didn’t think they’d ever be really close or anything, he had to admit that Leon was a pretty good guy all around. He had a way of making you like him from the first meeting, a quality which Jake almost never trusted in a man. Leon was all right in his book, though.

He hesitated before he called. Though he was sure Leon would be up for talking, Jake had never initiated contact with him before. He never minded when Sherry had him over for dinner, or when she talked him into coming by to help them move a couch or something, but Jake didn’t really consider him a friend. He had never even considered him someone that he might one day be able to be friends with.

But another six hours cooped up in the silent condo with nothing but his thoughts was more than he could take. Jake stabbed his thumb resolutely onto the phone, and then he lifted it and listened to it trill in his ear.

Leon picked up on the forth ring.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Hey. It’s Jake.” Then, just in case Leon was swamped with calls from Jakes that day, he added, “Jake Muller.”

“Sure,” Leon said. He cleared his throat as if it were dry. “What’s up?”

“I didn’t catch you at a bad time, did I?”

“No. I just have a headache. Kind of got a slow start this morning.”

“Me too,” Jake said. He paused, mulling things over, but Leon didn’t jump in and ask him what he wanted, why he was calling out of nowhere. He just sat there patiently on the other end of the line, letting Jake work his way up to being ready to talk.

“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Jake began carefully, testing it out.

“Yeah?” Leon said. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Jake said.

“Then why did you call me?” There was a hint of dry amusement in Leon’s voice. Jake knew he wasn’t laughing at him, but he was laughing all the same.

“Sherry wanted me to invite you over for dinner on Sunday. That okay?”

“That’s fine,” Leon replied. “I’ll be there.”

He said it right away, without that momentary pause that suggested he was checking to make sure it didn’t conflict with something else he had going on. Jake hadn’t realized it before, but Leon never really seemed to do much that didn’t involve him and Sherry. It seemed weird that a guy like that wasn’t more popular, but it also made him feel a little better. Jake may have been a bored and friendless loser here in the Land of Opportunity, but at least he didn’t have to be one alone.

“Sherry’s going to be happy to hear that,” Jake said. “Come by around seven.”

“Sure,” Leon said, and then, before Jake could hang up, he added, “Hope your day gets better.”

“Yours too.”

“I think I’ll lay down for a bit. Try to wait out this damn hangover.”

“I thought you said you had a headache,” Jake said.

“I do. I have a headache because I’m hungover. See you Sunday, Jake.”

He hung up and Jake was left holding the silent phone in his hand. Leon had given him the chance to get it all out, to tell him everything, and Jake had dropped the ball. He had realized that there was no way to talk about money, about Sherry, about any one thing without talking about everything. He wasn’t ready for that. Those past traumas had long since healed, and he wasn’t about to go around rebreaking old bones just because they hadn’t set exactly right.

That wasn’t the only reason he had clammed up at the moment of truth, though. Jake did not want to admit it, not even to himself, but it had been at that instant that he had seen his father’s face. Wesker would never have gone whining to someone like Leon just because he felt lonely, or bewildered, or overwhelmed.

Hell, Wesker probably had all kinds of weird Objectivist notions about how loneliness was a weakness of character and bewilderment the mark of an inefficient mind, or whatever else they taught you at college. That wasn’t why Jake hadn’t been able to say anything. It had been when he imagined his father laughing at him, when he imagined him being disappointed, that was when he had pulled away as if he had been stung.

His father had done this to him. Made him proud about money when he didn’t have the slightest idea what it was like to be poor. Wesker may have been lean and hungry looking, but that didn’t mean he knew what it was like to starve. He’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and then he’d made a second one to nestle right next to the first.

Even now, there was probably more money in his name stashed in Swiss banks than Jake would ever see in his life. You could do worse than to get your hands on those account numbers, Jake thought. It wasn’t as if Wesker needed the money where he was now.

***

“He looks the same,” said a voice in the darkness. All had been darkness since he awoke, and silence until that voice pierced through him, a black arrow arching across a black sky. He felt no relief at the presence of another person in that shadowy and noiseless place, only annoyance at having had his peace disturbed.

“Check the EEG,” said someone else. The first speaker had been a man, the second a woman. These were indisputable facts, and he clung to them. He repeated the words over to himself: _one man, one woman_. It wasn’t much now, but there was always power in truths judiciously combined. “He’s moved out of REM sleep. He’s conscious.”

“Do you think he knows we’re here?”

“Look at him,” the woman said. “He doesn’t know shit.”

“He looks like a burned grilled cheese.”

“You have a way with words, darling.” He thought that the woman was closer now, but he couldn’t say for sure. He heard everything, felt everything, thought everything as if through a layer of cotton gauze.

“The virus is still kicking away, though. The nightshift has been dosing him with enough antiretroviral drugs to eradicate AIDS in West Africa, but he’s already regenerating lost tissue.”

“What if he comes back as a different person?” the man said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, there’s not much of what was originally there to regenerate. What if he comes back looking different, with different brain chemistry and whatever?”

“Are you asking me what happens if he’s an innocent man?” the woman said dryly.

The man gave a cynical laugh. It was a rough and ugly sound, but he knew that it was how he sounded when he laughed. How he had sounded.

“Yeah,” the man said. “What if he comes back an innocent little infant?”

“Then we’ll include it in the notes section of our report. I doubt it will ever get that far, though. We’ll be lucky if we get a slice of living, undamaged tissue from this.”

He felt an abrupt biting pain near his shoulder and he pulled away from it instinctively. His body strained, and he felt the winding and unwinding of muscles. His tendons pulled uselessly, broken belts inside a ruined machine, and he knew he had not moved.

And that agony in his shoulder dove deeper, deeper, until he thought he had found the very depths of it and then realized he had only just scratched the surface.

A cry came up from somewhere inside of him, some uncharted place that was not on the map he kept of himself. Much to his relief, no sound came out. He could feel loose chords vibrating inside his throat, moving futilely, no longer anchored to muscle.

“The heart monitor is all over the place,” the man said. “I guess that hurt.”

“He doesn’t know when to quit. He’s like a slab of meat hooked up to a car battery. Look, when you cut away the necrotized flesh, there’s new skin underneath.”

“Smooth as a baby’s ass.”

“We should get some pictures of this,” the woman said. “I want to check the progress every day. Try not to announce it to the whole world, though.”

“You mean I can’t take some pictures with it for Grindr?”

“Babe, you could put the lost Arc of the Covenant on your Grindr profile and you still wouldn’t fool anyone into swiping right.”

“I’ll have you know, I’ve seen even more pictures of literal assholes since I got on Grindr then you’ve seen metaphorical assholes since you started working here.”

He felt the blade again, probing around the edges of the wound that the woman had opened up in his shoulder. It sent little aftershocks of pain though him. He knew that he was not healing like he should.

“If we play our cards right,” she said thoughtfully, “we can leverage this into a promotion out of this place.”

“Or we can piss off the wrong people and end up in a world of shit.”

“You might piss them off,” the woman said. “I’m too charming for that.”

“And you’re pretty good at this science thing. I’m surprised.” The man paused. “Not surprised because you’re a girl. But surprised.”

“I went to biology camp in middle school. We did dissections. Science is all about dissembling, you know. Taking things apart, breaking them down, asking ‘why’ until all previous assumptions dissolve and blow away like the fluff on the head of dandelion.”

“That’s cool. I wouldn’t mind taking him apart,” the man said. “Hey, do you think his dick is still there?”

“Burned to a crisp,” the woman said with a sigh. “I already checked.”

“Of course you did. I hope that grows back.”

“Of course you do,” she replied. “You know, I’m glad we’re working together again. You’re not as hopeless as you look. We always have fun. This experiment is going to be really rewarding, in a lot of ways.”

The experiment, he realized. That was him.


	4. Chapter 4

Sherry got home late that evening. Jake had whipped up a pretty good eggplant parmesan from a recipe he’d gotten watching the food channel, but by the time Sherry walked through the door at a quarter to nine, it had gotten cold sitting on top of the stove and the red sauce had congealed into slime.

Jake heard her take off her boots at the door, stumbling a few times when she had to stand on one foot to pull down the zippers. She came into the kitchen looking pale, with dark circles under her eyes that Jake swore had not been there the last time her. There was a run in one of the legs of her stockings.

He’d been all set to be annoyed that she hadn’t called, but when he saw her, Jake paused. “Long day, babe?”

“Longest day ever,” Sherry said. She spotted the eggplant parmesan and all but threw herself at it.

Jake sat with her while she ate ravenously, but she didn’t have much to say. After she had finished the eggplant, and the rest of the garlic bread Jake had made to go with it, and an extra grilled cheese that he made for her because she was still hungry, she sat back in her chair and laughed a little.

“I’m so embarrassed that you just saw me eat all that.”

“It’s okay,” Jake said. “I guess it means you trust me. Next thing you know, you’ll be leaving the door open while you pee and farting in front of me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’ve never farted in my life.”

Jake laughed. “Why don’t I clean this stuff up?”

“But you already did all the cooking…”

“And you had the longest day ever, right? I’ll clean up, you take a shower, and we’ll rendezvous on the couch in 20 so I can make sympathetic noises while you tell me all about it.”

“You’re the best,” Sherry said, and when she kissed him before she ran out of the kitchen she made sure to make it count.

Jake sat at the table and sipped a glass of wine. He heard the shower come on and listened to it hum through the walls. He’d been all ready to talk about his feelings and all that other relationship shit, just like a good little boyfriend, but it seemed like Sherry didn’t really feel up for it. Maybe when you stayed home all day like he did you didn’t get to have real problems anymore.

He got up and washed the dishes in the sink, then he loaded up the dishwasher and set the timer so it wouldn’t start until Sherry was out of the shower. He poured himself another glass of wine, and headed into the living room to wait. Sherry came out and joined him a little while later. She was dressed in her pajamas, wrapped up in a thick belted cardigan sweater. Her hair was in damp curls around her face. She’d always liked to let it air dry.

“You didn’t even turn on the TV,” she said as she flopped down next to him.

“I was waiting for you. I thought you wanted to talk.”

“I just have a lot of stuff going on at work,” Sherry said, cuddling up so her head was on his shoulder. She seemed on the verge of falling asleep again.

“You can tell me about work, you know.”

“Jake…” Sherry sighed, looking up at him. “I really can’t. A lot of it is confidential.”

“It’s not like I’m going to sell your secrets to the Russians or something.”

“I know. But I don’t feel right talking about it. I’m working on a big project right now, but I can’t tell you the details. I’m sorry.”

“Sure,” Jake said. “I understand. I won’t bring it up again.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I was thinking, why don’t we have Leon over on Sunday for dinner?”

“Sunday…” Sherry echoed vaguely, as if she could not remember what the word meant. “Sure, I think that would be nice. Are you starting to like Leon, Jake?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Leon’s a solid bro.”

“He likes you.”

“He likes everybody.”

“So?”

“So, I’m not special.” He bent his head and kissed her, and then he switched on the TV. Some blond detectives out on the other coast were grilling a murder suspect. Everyone was wearing suits they couldn’t possibly afford on a cop’s salary, and it made Jake think about those little red numbers in the budget again.

When the commercial came on, he turned down the volume and said, “I’m thinking about canceling my gym membership.”

“Really?” Sherry said, startled. “But you always talk about how much you like it…”

“It’s not really that great.”

“Last week you told me it was the one thing you look forward to every day.”

“But we can’t afford it,” Jake said. His mouth felt dry as he spoke, but he thought he got the words off all right. “I can just start running around the neighborhood or something.”

Sherry leaned back to look him in the face. She was scowling, and it made a little V appear between her pale eyebrows. “What makes you think we can’t afford it?”

“I had a look at the budget today.” This time, there was a little tremor in his voice. Jake heard it, and he wondered if Sherry had. “It’s not a big deal or anything…”

“Oh, Jake,” Sherry sighed. “Those are old numbers. I haven’t updated them since you moved in. We’re not about to get evicted or anything, I promise.”

“Still,” Jake said. “97 dollars is a lot of money.”

“I didn’t think you’d memorize the exact amount…” Sherry frowned.

“I could go get a job. There’s got to be something I can do to pull my weight around here.”

Sherry surprised him by planting a kiss on his mouth. “Jake, you’re already the best thing that’s ever happened around here. You don’t have to do anything except keep being wonderful.”

Jake felt his cheeks grow hot, and he realized he was blushing. “I guess that settles that,” he muttered, embarrassed.

“You’re right. It’s all settled now.” Sherry relaxed beside him, resting her head on his shoulder. The commercials were already over, and the show with the cops was back on. Jake turned the volume back up.

After a few minutes, Sherry looked up at him. “I think the brother-in-law did it.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I figured that.”

“Guess you know everything, huh?”

“Guess I do.”

“Do you know what I’m thinking right now?” Sherry said, and before Jake could answer, he felt the small and insistent pressure of her hand on his thigh, edging up until her hand was cupped around the bulge in the crotch of his pajama pants.

“I’m starting to get an idea,” Jake said. He gave her a squeeze with the arm he had around her waist. “How about another hint?”

“It’s not Twenty Questions, Jake.”

“It is if all the answers are yes.” Her grip on him shifted, and his cock hopped to attention in her hand, zero to sixty in about a millisecond.

“Why Miss Birkin, I’m starting to think you like me.”

She slipped her hand back into his pajamas, exploring his erection with the pads of her fingers. “Not as much as your little friend here likes me.”

Jake decided he’d had about all of that he could handle. He tightened his grip on Sherry’s waist and stood up abruptly, dragging her along and slinging her over his shoulder.

“Jake!” she squeaked, kicking her legs awkwardly below where he was gripping her across the thighs. “This is an illegal move!”

“You want me to put you down…?”

“No!” She brought her palm down hard on his ass. “Put me down in the bedroom.”

Jake started down the hall, and she slapped him again. “Faster!” 

“Ow, babe, that actually kind of hurts…”

They made it back to the bedroom, and Jake unshouldered her, setting her down on the edge of the bed. Sherry shook her messy hair back and looked up at him. Her cardigan had come unbelted and fallen away from her shoulders.

Jake leaned forward, over her, and she bent one leg up between them, setting her toes against his chest and stopping him in his tracks.

“Wait,” she said. “I want to fool around, but only on one condition.”

“That you get to be on top?”

“Nice try,” Sherry said. “But actually, I don’t want to hear even one more word about money, or work, or the budget.”

“Doesn’t give us much to discuss, does it?”

“We should try to stick to more intellectual topics.”

“You mean like food trucks? Because there’s this amazing one that usually parks downtown by the library that has bahn mi…”

Sherry laughed. “Talking is overrated. Just get over here already.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jake said. He leaned over her, and she kneeled up to meet him in a kiss. Her fists clutched in the front of his tee-shirt, drawing him close. But when he looped an arm around her waist, he felt that old familiar tension, muscles clenching beneath the palm of his hand.

For the record, Sherry had never actually pulled away from him, and she had never given him any indication – save that winding up as if in preparation of flight – that she didn’t want to be touched. Still, tonight, Jake paused.

“Babe, you’re sure you want this, right?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” She sounded hurt. Jake had known even before it was out that it was going to be the wrong thing to say, but he hadn’t anticipated how badly she was going to take it.

“I don’t know. I guess what I’m saying is, I think it would be pretty hot if you, you know, told me what I should do.”

“What do you mean? Like, I want you to have intercourse with me?”

Jake laughed. “You could make it sound a little sexier than that.”

She pursed her lips and lowered her upper eyelids, making a face that just missed sultry and landed in the neighborhood of drunk. “I want you to have intercourse with me,” she purred.

“Try not calling it intercourse?”

“What about coitus?”

“You know what?” Jake said. “Let’s work it out later.”

Sherry squeaked as he toppled her back on the bed, and as he crawled over her he felt her body arch up against his. “Fornication?” she said.

“Gross.”

“Congress? Dalliance?”

“That last one’s not bad,” Jake said.

“You’re really sweet, Jake,” she replied. He felt her tugging at the hem of his shirt and he slipped it off for her. She drew the tip of one finger down his chest, and he wound up in anticipation, expecting the bite of her fingernail cutting into his skin. Instead, he felt only the soft cushions that crowned her finger. She had, he realized, bitten the nail down to the quick without him ever realizing it.

“What’s wrong?” Sherry murmured.

“Nothing,” Jake said. His face felt hot, as if he had been caught doing something wrong.

“Really?” She curled her hand around the bulge in the front of his pajama pants, making his stomach turn over weightlessly. “Then this isn’t a problem?”

“That’s a big problem, babe.”

The corners of Sherry’s eyes creased with amusement, a smile that did not appear on her lips. “Are you sure it’s all the big?”

“Huge.”

“We’ll just have to see about that.” She set her palm in the center of his chest and toppled him onto his back. Swinging one leg over, she straddled his hips. He could feel how wet she was, even through two layers of clothes.

She pulled her shirt off over her head, and Jake’s hands settled on her hips automatically, not knowing, even as he moved, that he was going to do it. He felt her shiver, but it was different this time, not a shudder of anxiety but rather a tremor in response to the calluses that webbed Jake’s fingers.

Once she had told him that she liked that he was still a little bit rough. He hadn’t told her that it was only the constant chafing of the world that had made him that way.

***

Eventually, he got healthy enough to feel sick, and he knew that he was quite unwell indeed. His head throbbed like it had been cleaved in two, a big black fissure looming in the darkness in which he was physically and mentally suspended. His stomach was clenched and knotted like a fist, and when he tried to move his limbs the slightest effort made his heart race and his throat constrict. He thought he had lost consciousness a few times, but he couldn’t be sure. He no longer knew when he was awake and thinking and when he was asleep and dreaming.

But he wasn’t sick, he thought. This was no illness. He was hurt. He was hurt very badly, far beyond what a body ought to have been able to endure.

He remembered the fire, remembered burning. For a brief, irrational moment he thought that he must be there even now. Burning beneath the earth. Somehow still alive, dying forever.

The process of dying didn’t frighten him. It was a simple chemical formula, the transference of matter, a procedure by which nothing was gained or lost. But this limbo, this uncertainty, scared him very badly. He tried to fight against it, to claw his way free, but he ran up against a wall of agony that slapped him back down into oblivion.

A cool hand came out of the darkness and stroked his brow, and he felt a sharp and unfamiliar pain in the ruined sockets where his eyes had been. That was how he knew that he was still dreaming. If he had been awake, he never would have come so close to tears.

When he had been six years old, he had come down with a fever. He remembered a dark room with a heavy shade drawn across the window. A little ribbon of sunlight had come in around the edge of the curtain, and as he had watched it crawl across the wall.

He was burning, and he would never go out. He had always been in the fire.

Beneath his cheek, he recalled now, the pillow had been damp with sweat. Sometimes he felt impersonal hands on him. Moving him, changing the sheets, placing an IV in one of his small veins. Then one day the fever broke, and he was all alone. Before, there had been other children here; now, they were gone. It never occurred to him to ask to where they had vanished. He understood that they were dead and that he had lived. There was no point getting sentimental about it. The fire had not gone out, but he had learned to beat it back with his reason, put it out of sight.

“Look at this,” the woman said. Her voice brought him out of unconsciousness, worrying him back into the dark and motionless waking world. He loathed her for it, but he clung to her voice all the same. It was the only way to be sure he was really here.

Her fingers moved over his face, prying open the flaps of skin that had fused over his desiccated eye sockets. For a moment, the shadows that covered him broke and he could see light, dull gray as if filtered through a cataract. Then a shade passed in front of him and the light was gone, as if it had been no more than optical illusion cobbled into place by a damaged and panicked mind.

“That white thing in there is the optical nerve. It’s starting to regenerate.”

He heard the man’s voice now. “Thanks, Jessica. I was just thinking to myself how much I wanted to see the grossest thing ever.”

“You’re the one with red chest hair. You don’t get a say in what’s gross.”

The woman’s thumb stroked a slow, thoughtful circle around the inner ridge of his eye socket. It was an awful, intimate sensation, and it reminded him of Excella. He detested most things about her. Her hands, her voice, the way she acted as if the two of them were not just biding time until it was advantageous to turn on each other.

He’d never asked her to touch him, but sometimes she had. He remembered her fingers combing through his hair, pressing his temples, digging into the backs of his shoulders. It had all been so strange, so unwelcome, that it had taken him a long time to realize that, in her own chilly way, she was trying to make him feel good.

Maybe she would come for him soon… No, no, she was dead. He knew that. It wasn’t like him to lose track of something important like that.

“His fingers are twitching,” the man announced.

“He doesn’t have fingers.”

“His stubs are twitching.”

The hand on his brow withdrew. For an instant, he saw gray light, light so faint and diffuse that it could hardly be called light at all. Then darkness descended once more.

“They are twitching,” the woman said. Her name was Jessica. That’s what the other had called her. He’d do well to remember that.

“What do you make of it?” the man said.

“It’s icky.”

“Astounding powers of observation.”

“Are you getting scared, Raymond darling?”

“Scared of a guy like that getting loose in the world again? Is this a trick question?”

“Relax,” Jessica said. “Nothing’s going to happen. There’s nothing he can do like this, and if he tries, I’m here to show him who’s boss.”


	5. Chapter 5

The next day, Jake decided to do two workouts to make up for the one he had missed. He was pleased to have Sherry’s blessing to continue his gym membership, though he still felt a lingering shadow of guilt clinging to him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he had brought up money in the first place, or because he had hardly put up a fight at all when Sherry had said there was no problem. He had accepted it with barely a whimper.

About half way through his second turn in the weightroom, the battery in Jake’s iPod died. He’d been listening to one of those pop culture podcasts, trying to catch up on everything he’d missed growing up in the backwater of Eastern Europe. He’d never admitted it to Sherry, but he was genuinely afraid of talking with Americans his age, scared that he’d miss a reference to Buffy the Vampire Killer or whatever and die some kind of agonizing social death.

When the little device clicked off mid-sentence, Jake was so startled he actually jumped a little. There were about five or six other guys down in the weightroom, puffing and clanking the barbells around. He barely heard them, though. Without the steady flow of happy chatter streaming through his earphones, it seemed quiet.

Jake had been following the same workout for so long that he could do it on muscle memory alone. If he didn’t have something to distract him, then he wouldn’t have to think at all. He could just let his mind wander. When that happened, he almost never liked where he ended up.

His palms were slick with sweat, and they slid on the bars when he tried to lift a pair of weights. He dried his hands on his basketball shorts and tried again.

At some point along the line, Jake thought, his father had done this too. That skinny kid Jake had once seen in a photograph would, only a few years later, go on to lead the STARS unit. He hadn’t gotten there without some serious training. It would have been tough on someone like him. He was used to things coming easily, and getting into fighting shape certainly wouldn’t have been a breeze. Wesker had done it, though. Not because he liked working out, not because he wanted to look better, not because it gave him confidence. Only because he had known how strong he would need to be to face what was to come.

Of course, it would have been easier with a personal trainer and a private gym at his disposal. Wesker could have afforded all that. It seemed like it all came back to money with him, which was just another reason for Jake to hate him. By all accounts, Wesker had more cash than he ever could have spent. He could have saved them both back in Edonia. He could have paid his mother’s medical bills, not out of any lingering affection for her but simply on a whim.

He could have done everything for them, but he had not.

The worst part about it was that all that money was probably sitting in some offshore account somewhere, untouched since Wesker’s death. Jake was his only family, and at the end it seemed like Wesker had been pretty short on friends, too.

Maybe he’d left it all to charity, Jake thought bitterly; the Metropolitan Opera or the Humane Society.

If he could only get his hands on a tiny fraction of Wesker’s fortune, he’d really put it to good use. He’d be able to start pulling his weight financially. He could help pay off the car, and maybe he’d even be able to do something nice for Sherry. She never really wore a lot of jewelry, but maybe she would if he could find the right pieces for her.

It would never happen, though. He had no claim to that money and he was never going to see a damn cent of it. If he walked into some lawyer’s office claiming to be Wesker’s bastard kid and demanding eighteen years’ worth of back child support, birthday gifts, and money for school books, they’d just laugh him right back out again.

It was best to just put it all out of his mind.

Jake couldn’t do it, though. He may not have had any claim to that money, but neither did anyone else. And just maybe that meant he was actually starting on equal footing for once in his life.

***

When Jake got home, he realized there was a pile of laundry to get done, and he all but threw himself on it, grateful for the distraction. But after the clothes were sorted and the first load was spinning cheerfully inside the machine, he hesitated.

He flipped on the TV and tried to watch the afternoon news, but he couldn’t focus. He thought reading something might take his mind off it, but he didn’t dare pick up the computer now; he was afraid of where a few idle keystrokes might take him. Restless, he went into the kitchen and started dinner. He cut up some potatoes and carrots and put them in the slow cooker with a roast. It was the only thing he knew how to make that needed to be started so early in the afternoon.

For a while, he just watched the food cook, the little bubbles of broth forming around the rim of the slow cooker. All at once, his head snapped up as if he had come out of a trance.

To hell with it, he thought. He’d just do a little research, just satisfy his curiosity. It wasn’t as if he had anyone to answer to here.

He grabbed Sherry’s laptop and sat down at the kitchen table. Feeling bold, almost defiant, he pulled up a search engine and typed in “inheritance law”. A bunch of results came back. Skimming through them, Jake gathered that a lot of the specifics depended on what state the dead person had lived in.

Here, Jake hesitated. He knew vaguely that Wesker had died overseas, but he didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t have been a United States citizen. Still, he had no idea what state his father had called home. Raccoon City was in Colorado, so that seemed like as good a guess as anything, but he couldn’t say for sure.

The realization made him feel strange and ashamed. Over the past few weeks he’d begun to get the impression that he was developing some kind of connection with his father, like he was starting to understand him. Now he remembered that he had never really known him at all.

Disgusted, Jake slammed the laptop closed. He’d done a lot of shit for money in his time. There weren’t too many things he hadn’t been willing to dirty his hands with if the price was right. This didn’t sit well with him, though.

Money was one thing. Letting your personal feelings enter into it was very much another.

Jake didn’t want to look up anything else. He’d leave Wesker’s money where it was. Let him take it to hell with him for all Jake cared.

It would be better that way.

***

On Sunday, Leon came over. Jake had all but forgotten about their dinner date, but fortunately Sherry didn’t let it slip his mind entirely. She got out the good dishes, and even pulled a white tablecloth that Jake didn’t even know they’d owned out of some obscure cupboard.

It was a lot of trouble to go to for fried chicken and some homemade macaroni and cheese, but Jake was careful not to mention that. Sherry seemed to be in a genuinely good mood for once, humming to herself as she bustled around the house getting everything just right.

She has a crush on Leon, Jake realized abruptly. Or at least she’d had one at some point along the line. Jake surprised himself by not really minding, at least not enough to feel a real pang of jealousy.

Hell, from what Jake knew of their past together, he’d be more suspicious if Sherry didn’t have a little bit of a thing for him.

Leon showed up right on time, and when Jake came to the door to let him in, he noticed the faint smell of alcohol around him. He wasn’t reeking of it or anything, and he sure wasn’t acting drunk, but Jake realized Leon had already had a few beers before he came over.

It didn’t strike Jake as all that strange. In the army, he’d known plenty of guys who’d turned to drinking as a kind of balm to help soothe away the things they’d seen and done. Jake had never thought it was shameful, or even all that mystifying. It was just something other people did.

Still, he didn’t like thinking of Leon as one of those other people. If he hadn’t made it through everything unscarred, then what hope could there possibly be for the rest of them?

After what seemed like about a year, Sherry finally came barreling out of the kitchen, kicking up enough noise to drown out that unanswerable question, scattering it from the corners and airing out the last of its presence in the room.

She flung her arms around Leon’s neck. “Where have you been hiding? I feel like I never see you anymore!”

“Cashing in some well-earned vacation days,” Leon said, allowing himself to be led inside. Jake trailed behind them, a wisp of shadow in their wake. “I drove up to Atlantic City.”

“Atlantic City is for old people,” Sherry said, wrinkling her nose.

“Then it suits me fine. I feel like I’ve lived about a thousand years already.”

“Don’t go drying up into wrinkled old husk before you taste Jake’s chicken,” Sherry said. She was still fussing over Leon, getting him settled at the table. “He’s turned into a pretty good cook. I still had to make dessert, though. He doesn’t like to bake.”

“There are too many little spoons and cups and things,” Jake said, taking his seat. “Too much chemistry.”

Sherry poured Leon a glass of wine, and Jake found himself watching carefully to see how Leon would react to the alcohol. He glanced at it, but it didn’t make him get weird or anything. Jake couldn’t tell if he was relieved or disappointed.

“Jake’s like me,” Leon said. “A shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy.”

“How’d all that shooting from the hip work out for you in Atlantic City?” Sherry called from the kitchen. She had the plates in there and she was dishing up dinner for them.

“I lost more than I’d care to admit at blackjack, but then I hit the jackpot on one of the slot machines. I rode the bus back with a giant sack full of nickels that I won.”

“Nickle slots?” Sherry said, edging back into the dining room with the plates balanced on her arms. “You really are old, Leon.”

“I’m all but retired now,” Leon replied. “It’s time I started playing the part. This smells great, Jake.”

Sherry seemed to have brightened up some. There was more color in her cheeks than Jake could remember seeing there in a while. Over dinner, she talked a lot about work, but she didn’t actually say anything specific about the projects she was assigned to. Maybe they really were Top Secret, Jake thought. He’d had always assumed that was just her way of saying she didn’t want to discuss them with him.

After they had finished eating, Sherry, who had never left a dirty plate in the sink overnight, stayed behind to load the dishwasher. Jake and Leon stepped out on the tiny balcony and drank a couple of beers in the cool night air.

They were silent for a while. It didn’t even occur to Jake that they were supposed to be making conversation until Leon said, “The house looks really great, you know.”

“Thanks,” Jake said. “I try to take good care of it.”

“Do you have enough to keep you busy? I mean, do you get bored without anything to do during the day?”

Jake shrugged. “Do you?”

“I thought I would when I first decided to leave the full time job and go on retainer,” Leon said. “But I’m actually doing okay.”

Jake was briefly annoyed with him. He hadn’t expected him to answer honestly.

“I’ve been catching up on a lot of reading,” Leon said. “And I’ve picked up my guitar again for the first time since high school. I think I might take a class, too. French or something. I’d like to learn French. What about you?’

“I’ve got the gym,” Jake said. “I’ve got a lot of things that keep me busy.”

“Any hobbies?” Leon said.

Jake glanced over at him. Leon was turned toward him slightly, and when he watched him like that Jake knew that he couldn’t tell him anything. All at once, Leon looked away, out over the bright, regular lights of the city. He took a long swallow of beer.

Inside, Jake could hear the water running in the kitchen. Sherry would still be a few minutes at least, and with the sink on, she wouldn’t hear what he said.

“I looked up some stuff about my dad this week,” Jake said quietly.

“Stuff?” Leon echoed.

“Money stuff,” Jake said. “He owes me, I figure. It’s the least he can do.”

“Did you find anything?” Leon asked.

“Nothing.” Jake sighed. “It’s not like I had a whole lot to go on. Just a name, really. Sometimes I wonder if he really was my father, or if all this is just some joke everyone is playing on me.”

“If it’s a joke, it’s not a very funny one,” Leon said. “You probably aren’t asking for advice, are you?”

“Not really,” Jake said. “I just thought I might get lucky for once, you know?”

“You think you’re not lucky?”

“I guess I’m doing pretty well for myself,” Jake said. “I’ve got Sherry, and we’ve got this place together. I’ve got more peace and quiet than I know what to do with.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“It bothers me more than I thought. That someone like Wesker could die with all those secrets, without leaving anyone behind who knows anything about him. Even if it’s just so they could tell me what an asshole he was all the time, I’d like to talk to someone who knew him.”

“Chris knew him. Chris Redfield.”

Jake laughed, shaking his head. “I can’t ask him. He’d just take it the wrong way. He doesn’t like me much as it is.”

“I’m not exactly his favorite person these days either.”

Jake glanced at him briefly. Inside, he heard the sink shut off, which meant he only had a minute left before Sherry came out to join them.

“Leon, did you ever meet him?”

“Wesker?” Leon shook his head. “Not once. But I was in Raccoon City, and I don’t blame him for what happened there. I’m not trying to say that I think he’s misunderstood or innocent or anything, but one person couldn’t have made all that happen on his own. Part of me wants to believe that he just got swept up in things, like all the rest of us did. I don’t like to think that there are evil people in the world.”

“If he didn’t do it, then who did?”

“A company,” Leon said with a shrug. “An idea, a philosophy. Something huge and inhuman that would benefit from having one insignificant human being to pin all its crimes on.”

“It wasn’t any corporate philosophy that could have paid my mom’s doctor bills and didn’t.”

“You sure about that?” Leon said.

Jake glanced over at him sharply. He knew what Leon was getting at, but it was the last thing he needed or wanted to hear from him. Leon, the Boy Scout. As American as apple pie. It didn’t mean much coming from him.

Before Jake had a chance to answer, Sherry came out of the other room. She had a bottle of beer in one hand and her phone in the other, and she was sneaking a quick peek at her work email before she joined them.

“What are you boys talking about?”

Jake didn’t answer. He couldn’t tell her the truth, and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say to change the subject. Fortunately, Leon was there to cover for him.

“I’m trying to convince Jake to start learning French with me?”

“Really?” Sherry smiled. “Jake, are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not really good with languages. Besides, French isn’t very practical.”

“It is when you’re being romantic.”

“I’m already romantic,” Jake said. “I let you eat the olives out of my salad, and I paint your toenails for you, remember?”

“And those things would be even better if you could speak French while you do them.” All at once, her expression softened into something fond and kind. It took Jake totally by surprise.

“Besides,” she said. “I like the idea of you and Leon spending time together. My two favorite boys ought to keep an eye on each other when I’m not around.”


	6. Chapter 6

Sherry woke up before the alarm the next morning and couldn’t get back to sleep no matter how hard she tried. Beside her in bed, Jake was out like a light, sprawled on his back and snoring softly.

Amongst the numerous uncanny things the researchers in Lanshiang had discovered about Jake was that he could get by quite comfortably on only two or three hours of sleep a night. Weeks might go by like that, even months, without any noticeable degeneration of his memory or cognitive functions.

You’d never know it from looking at him in civilian life. Sherry was sure he slept for a solid eight hours every night, and on the rare occasion that she had the weekend to sleep in, Jake was right there next to her the whole time.

Jake actually got more sleep that she did these days. Between the late nights at the office and the rude pre-dawn awakenings like this one, Sherry was beginning to feel terribly tired.

At first, the lack of sleep hadn’t bothered her much. Though she had known from the start that she wasn’t getting enough rest, she had been riding a wave of jittery anxiety since Jake had moved in. For the first few weeks, she had fretted herself to sleep well after midnight every night, keeping perfectly still in the dark so she wouldn’t disturb Jake, watching the red numbers on the alarm clock tick by. But as long as she didn’t allow herself think about how little shuteye she was actually getting, she never really felt all that sleepy.

It had to be taking its toll on her by now, she thought as she lay there wide-eyed, with the first blue light of morning creeping around the edges of the curtains. There was a chance she wasn’t all here mentally anymore.

She hated to admit that a morbid part of her actually relished that idea.

Sherry got up, quietly switching off the alarm before it could sound. She had laid out her clothes the night before, leaving them impeccably folded on the chair next to the bed. Her underwear and socks lay on top. She scooped everything up and took it into the bathroom, where she tried to make as little noise as possible to keep from disturbing Jake while she dressed.

She straightened her hair and dabbed on a touch of wine-colored lipstick. It made her look older, which she liked when she went in to the office. She felt like she blended in a little better that way. Make up, like a lot of things, Sherry had taught herself. She could not remember her mother ever owning a lot of cosmetics, though the few she did have were top of the line. She had a couple of pale lipsticks that cost $50 each, and an eye shadow palette or two, each with three muted shades and three figure price tags.

It wasn’t exactly the kind of makeup collection that invited a little girl to raid it for her games of dress up.  Besides, her mother had been a very busy woman, and she hadn’t been there to hold Sherry’s hand through every little thing. Sherry didn’t resent her for that. She had been to a lot of therapists since Raccoon City, and the one thing that practically never came up with any of them was the specter of her mother. Sherry neither blamed, not missed, nor fixated on, nor resented her. How could she, when the woman had been all but a stranger to her?

She did remember one thing about her, though. When she had been six or seven, she had overheard her mother tell someone how proud she was of Sherry’s independence. It was the only time she could remember either of her parents praising her for something she was rather than something she had done. Good grades and obedience earned her a pat on the head from time to time, but those things were expected, even taken for granted, in their household.

Sherry knew that her mother’s work had destroyed her, devoured her as surely, though not as dramatically, as it had her father. She had barely known either of her parents, and yet she knew that much.

Sometimes she feared that their work-obsessed ways had left more of an impression on her than she had ever dreamed possible. After all, if not for her parents, how would Sherry have learned this habit of waking before dawn, going into the office to pour her labor into some insatiable and faceless edifice. Leaving behind the people who cared about her the most for the organization that cared the least, that was incapable of ever caring at all.

There was a difference, she reminded herself as she slipped on her stockings. Jake was a grown man, and he could more than take care of himself in her absence. When they got to the point where they could actually think about having kids, then she would take time off. All the time that she was due.

When she stepped out of the bathroom, Jake was still in bed, but his eyes were open and he was watching her.

“Hang on a minute, babe. I’ll get up and make you some coffee.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll stop at Starbucks on the way to the train.”

“Sure thing,” he said, rolling over on his side and pulling the blankets back up. “Have a good day at work.”

Sherry frowned. She watched his turned back, waiting for him to stir again, which he did not do. It wasn’t that she had wanted him to fuss over her, or that she wanted a cup of his bitter barracks coffee, but she had expected it. When he didn’t move to get up, she was too startled to be disappointed.

Quietly, she slipped out of the bedroom. In the hallway, she put on her shoes and her coat, then she grabbed her purse and went out into the chilly dawn air.

Jake had been strange over the past few weeks, or perhaps he had been strange for a lot longer than that and she had only been slow to notice. He was evasive, and he kept secrets from her. She could see that much. Then there were his odd half-formed notions about money and security.

For about the length of time it took her to walk the two blocks to the Metro station, Sherry wondered if he was having an affair. She dismissed the idea quickly, not because it seemed impossible for Jake to be so dishonest, but rather because she didn’t have the time or the inclination to deal with a crisis like that right now.

If Jake was cheating on her, she wouldn’t have had the first idea of what to say or do about it. She wouldn’t have even had the energy or the acuity to feel particularly mad.

***

At the DOS Home Office, Sherry handed her badge over to the guard and he scrutinized it closely before buzzing her in. Even after working there for close to a year, she hadn’t earned the distinction of having the security staff recognize her on sight.

The lobby was still all but empty at this hour, and Sherry’s heels clicked briskly on the marble tile. Just before she stepped on the elevator, she realized she never had stopped at Starbucks on the way in. She supposed she could find some instant coffee in the office kitchen. It wasn’t so bad if you poured enough sugar in it…

She was one of the first people in on her floor. The banks of lights over a couple of the cubicles were still turned off. Sherry went quietly to her desk, enjoying the feeling of being all but alone in a public place.

At her cubicle, she dropped her purse into one of her desk drawers. She turned to hit the button on her computer monitor, and froze.

In the little vase tucked into the back corner of her desk, there was a single red rose.

Slowly, Sherry straightened up, sneaking a look over the top of her cubicle. There was no one in sight. She plucked the rose out of the vase. It was so fresh that the stem was still firm and the petals were slightly damp. No more than a few minutes had passed since it had been left there, but the person who had planted it was long gone.

Sherry crushed the flower in her hand, then she folded a piece of printer paper around the remains and buried them deep in the bottom of the wastebasket.

She sat perfectly still, her hands folded neatly in her lap, for almost a full minute, composing herself. Then she jerked upright all at once, brushed her hair back into place, and sprang off to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.

For three months now, ever since she had been assigned to the taskforce working through the legal and technical red tape surrounding access rights to the old Umbrella surveillance satellites, Sherry had been receiving encrypted emails. They came from an unnamed informant, and they promised her inside information that she could use. They assured her that the tips would come when the time was right.

The messages were unreal to the point of absurdity. Sherry hadn’t been employed in intelligence long, but she knew that things simply didn’t work that way. News was gathered through networking and long hours of surveillance, not through strokes of daring, or profound luck, or individual genius.

Like war, like so many other things, there was no real glamour in it. Just early mornings and late nights, and a growing distance between her and the handful of people she had managed to keep in her life.

That flower, broken and already wilting in the bottom of her trashcan should not have existed. It was the sign her contact had given her. When he was ready to part with the information he had, the flower would be her cue to meet with him.

If her informant really knew as much as he let on, then surely he knew that this wasn’t how things were done. But, Sherry thought, this could be a test to see how she would react, whether she was up to the challenge. If that was the case, she had no idea what she was supposed to do, and a sinking feeling that she would be a disappointment no matter how hard she tried.

A red rose indicated a romantic temperament, a tendency towards grand gestures. Sherry herself had neither of those things. She would have preferred another email, or a cryptogram that she could set her mind to logically. But she also wanted the information her contact had, and whatever inviolate truth it might contain.

Sherry stood up suddenly, jerking to her feet as if she had been stung. She turned, feeling as if she were moved by strings like a marionette, and poured herself a cup of fresh coffee.

She drank it over the sink, barely tasting it.  It seemed to her that rose essence clung to the fingers of the hand that had crushed the flower, but Sherry knew it was probably just her imagination. It was impossible for the smell to have persisted so long, just as it was impossible that the flower could have been at her desk in the first place. From a purely practical perspective, no one should have been able, nor even had any desire, to break into a building as secure as the Home Office just to deliver a flower.

She wondered whether Jake would believe it, if he might even think it was funny. But in the same moment she knew that she couldn’t tell Jake about any of this. He was too absorbed in his own secrets at the moment to share in any of hers.

***

It seemed to take forever for noon to come. When it finally did, Sherry headed for the park near the Home Office. She felt momentarily disoriented being out like this in the middle of the day, and she realized that she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d had lunch away from her desk.

There was a bench hidden by a clump of trees down at the far end of one of the paths. In the evenings, when school was out, Sherry imagined it saw a lot of kids making out, but at noon on a workday, it was pretty much deserted.

Sherry sat down and smoothed out her skirt and tried to look nonchalant.  She remembered that there was a banana in her purse, and she pulled it out so that it would look like she’d just stopped to have some lunch.

The first bite tasted like ashes in her mouth, and she had to chew it until it was little more than water before she could even hope to swallow it down.

She was scared, she realized. She’d been terrified so badly so many times in the past she now no longer recognized the feeling for what it was. She hoped that also meant that no one else would recognize it either.

Sherry knew that she was still young, petite, more cute than pretty. Her fear had an effect on the people around her, and she hated that even more than the creeping feeling of apprehension itself.

Crisp footsteps came up the path behind her. Sherry recognized the sharp tap-tap of high heels, abruptly silenced as the wearer stepped down from the sidewalk and onto the grass. She willed herself not to turn, to do nothing to acknowledge the approach.

“Little Sherry Birkin…” The woman had a husky voice, laughing and secretive. “You’ve grown up.”

She came slowly around the bench, putting one foot directly in front of the other as if she were walking on a beam. A platinum blond in a lipstick red sundress and big sunglasses that obscured her face.

Sherry was taken aback. This woman couldn’t possibly be the spy she had been in contact with. The way she looked, she wouldn’t have been able to blend in anywhere.

“Have we met?” Sherry said, as the woman took a seat beside her on the bench.

“Not formally, but you can consider me a card carrying member of the Survivors of Raccoon City Club.”

“I see,” Sherry said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

“It was a bad time for everyone,” the woman replied.

“I’d been hoping to leave it behind,” Sherry said. “I heard you might have something for me.”

“All in good time,” the woman said. Sherry realized that she was studying her face closely. There was something familiar about the little slice of it she could see beneath the shadow of her sunglasses.

“Tell me,” the woman continued. “How is Jake Mueller?”

Sherry hesitated, unsure of what to say. The last thing she had wanted was to involve Jake in another mess, but it seemed that he was already all tied up in it.

“It’s all right,” the woman soothed. “I know all about Jake. You might say I’m a member of the Survivors of Lanshiang Club as well.”

“I guess it’s a small world.” Sherry said quietly.

“It depends on the company you keep.”

“Please,” Sherry said. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I came here today because I heard you had information for me and that’s all. I just want you to give me what you promised. I don’t think we have to pretend to be friends for that to happen.”

“No,” the woman replied. “But I prefer to make friends when I can. I’m forced to make enemies so often.”

She said them in the same light, laughing tone as always, but for some reason the words sent a chill down Sherry’s spine.

The woman reached into her purse and drew out a flashdrive. The plastic casing was shiny lipstick red. She set it on the bench between them. “You’re sure you want what’s on this?” she said.

“I wouldn’t have come out here if I hadn’t made up my mind,” Sherry replied.

“It might be dangerous.”

“It’s my duty,” Sherry said. “I owe it to the world to make sure that sensitive information like this doesn’t find its way into terrorist hands.”

“You’re a sweet girl, Sherry. And I know you mean well, but if you don’t pick up that drive right now, I’ll never think less of you, and I’ll never tell a soul.”

Sherry narrowed her eyes and reached over and snatched up the flashdrive. 

“All right,” the woman said. She stood up, smoothing her skirt over her hips with a small, practiced motion of her hand. “You don’t have to prove anything to me. There’s a password to get to the data, by the way. It’s ‘Albert Wesker’. All one word. Lowercase.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of a joke?’ Sherry said.

“Not at all,” the woman replied. “Just someone who’s been on my mind a lot lately. Besides, I thought it would be memorable. I’ll be in touch.”

She turned away, her heeled shoes making no sound at all on the grass, then tapping sharply, precisely as she stepped up on to the pavement. Sherry didn’t watch her go, and she waited what felt like a long time before she stood up to follow her.

The flashdrive was clutched tightly in her fist. She could feel the tiny plastic corners cutting in to her palm, but she could not make her grip on it relax. Around the first corner in the path, she caught a glimpse of something gold out of the corner of her eye. A flaxen ribbon was draped over the side of one of the park trashcans.

Making a great show of throwing out her rapidly browning banana peel, Sherry moved to investigate. It was just what she had thought it would be, and exactly what she had feared. A blond wig, the exact shade of the mysterious informant’s platinum hair, sat crumpled on top of the pile of trash inside. Laying on top of it, half hidden, was a pair of dark oversized sunglasses.


	7. Chapter 7

All through the rest of the day, even on the interminable train ride back to the apartment, Sherry kept slipping her hand into her purse and touching the flash drive. She hadn’t been able to check its contents on her work computer, and so she had tried not to think about it so as not to become distracted.

She hadn’t succeeded as well as she had hoped.

The more she tried to ignore the disk in her purse, the more pervasive the notion became that it was going to vanish right out from under her. That was why she was here now, wedged into one of the tiny vertical seats near the front of the train car, one hand wrapped like a vice around the strap of her purse, and the other sunk deep in its leather folds, clutching the drive in an iron grip.

She had already resolved not to get Jake involved in all this, and she didn’t even want the data in the house for him to stumble on. It was a too late for misgivings at this point, though, only a couple of stops away from home.  She knew that she would look at what was on the drive as soon as she could do so without arousing suspicion. She still refused to believe that it had been nothing more than a lucky break that had put that mysterious lady spy on her tail and landed the flash drive in her possession. Dumb luck just didn’t work that way.

Only the data on the drive could clear things up, but that was not the real reason she had taken it when it was offered. Against all her training, and all her common sense, and all her resolve to live a nice quiet life from now on, Sherry had taken that drive because she was so bored she could hardly stand it.

She spent her days staring unblinking at computer monitors in the service of her country, and in the evening she came home to a boyfriend who was restless and miserable and lonely. They would only grow to hate each other if this kept up. Or, worse yet, the two of them, who had seen so many terrible things and survived so much together, would become complacent and toothless, all the fight gone out of them.

That was why, when the prospect of another adventure had presented itself to her, Sherry had thrown herself on it and clung to it like the victim of a shipwreck clutching a raft. She was suddenly certain that the enigmatic woman in red had understood all that about her before even Sherry herself had realized it. For all her talk of knowing Sherry from Raccoon City and from Lianshang, she had not approached her because she had been impressed with her conduct in the field.

It was because somehow she had known that Sherry alone was so desperate and so inconsistent that she would take her up on her offer.

There was no time left to change her mind now. The train stopped at her station and Sherry got off. As she walked up the hill towards her apartment building, she drew the flash drive out of her purse and clasped it in her fist like a talisman.

When she got upstairs and inside, she could smell dinner on the stove and hear Jake still fussing around in the kitchen.

“Hey, babe,” he called. “You’re home early.”

“You always say that when dinner isn’t ready on time,” Sherry replied as she came into the kitchen. She listened carefully to her own voice, attuned to any cracks or tremors that would clue Jake in to the secret she was keeping. Everything sounded all right to her, and Jake didn’t seem to notice a thing.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “I promise.”

“It’s okay. I need to check my email really quick.”

Before Jake could respond, she ducked back into the living room. Her laptop was not in its usual place beside the sofa, nor was it in any of the spots she sometimes left it. When she went back into the kitchen to ask Jake if he had seen it, she was surprised to find it sitting open on the table.

“Did you use my computer?” she said. Her laptop wasn’t off limits to Jake by any stretch, but he had never shown any desire to use it before. He didn’t even have Facebook or anything, at least not one that he checked.

“I was just looking something up,” Jake said. “Is that okay?”

“Depends on what kind of porn you loaded it up with,” Sherry said in an easy voice, both amazed and appalled by how expertly and casually she deceived him.

“The intellectual kind,” Jake said. “Porn for the mind.”

Sherry laughed, and slipped the flash drive into one of the ports. When she opened it, it prompted her for a password. She remembered what it was, and yet she could not bring herself to type the letters. It was as if the sound of her fingers striking the keys would transmit a code that only Jake could decipher. He would hear, letter by letter, the sound of his father’s name and he would know everything.

“Really,” Sherry said quietly, her eyes transfixed by the blinking cursor. “What were you trying to find out?”

“Why do you want to know?” Jake said.

“I’m just curious.”

Jake opened the oven and pulled out a pan of carbonnade. He set it on top of the stove to cool and stood, bowed over slightly, watching the steam rise off the food.

“I was looking for a probate lawyer,” he said at last.

Sherry didn’t look up. Her eyes were on the screen when she said, “What for?”

“My inheritance,” Jake was facing the stove, not looking at her either, and Sherry had a strange and sudden notion that if either of them made eye contact with the other for even a moment, all would fly apart. “I think I can get a hold of it.”

Sherry was still staring at the computer, but she no longer saw it. A creeping sense of unease passed through her, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Whatever money he had is dirty,” she said. “He got it by making people suffer. Why would you want an inheritance like that?”

“It’s just money,” Jake replied. “It can’t be good or bad. It just exists.”

Sherry was quiet for a moment, then she suddenly started in her chair, jerking her head up as if awakened from a sound sleep. She slammed the laptop closed quickly, with a bang, so that Jake finally turned around and faced her.

“We don’t need money that badly,” she snapped. “We don’t need to go digging up the past like that. Your dad is dead and gone, just like mine is. It took me almost ten years to come to terms with it, but I know now that the world is better off without them in it.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Jake said. “At least you knew your folks when they were alive. At least they knew you. At least you always knew who you were. I bet you never had any trouble getting what you were due.”

“You’re right,” Sherry replied. “They left me a life insurance policy. I never touched it, though, Jake. I donated it all to the Survivors of Raccoon City Fund. I had to work pretty hard to get by, but I never wished I had that money of theirs.”

“Aren’t you a little Mother Teresa?” Jake said coldly, so coldly that Sherry was taken aback.

“You don’t have to be cruel to me, Jake.”

Jake opened his mouth as if to respond, then closed it again just as quickly. He turned back to the stove and picked up a spatula so he could push the carbonnade around listlessly in the pan.

“I’m sorry, babe,” he said at last. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t even know why I said it. I just feel like you do everything, and I want to have a hand in what we’ve got here, not just be along for the ride. Sometimes I think I’m just a houseguest, you know? Or a charity case.”

“You’re not,” Sherry sighed. “I never thought of you like that. Just because I work doesn’t mean I’m the only one pulling my weight. Money isn’t the only thing that matters.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “You’re right about that.”

He sounded like he didn’t believe it for a moment, but he had apologized and Sherry was too tired and wound up for an argument. Maybe it would all blow over, she thought. That didn’t seem too far-fetched.

“Listen, babe.” Jake hesitated. “If you’re still hungry—“

“I’m starving,” Sherry said. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Then let’s talk it over on a full stomach,” Jake replied, reaching up mechanically to get a couple of plates out of the cupboard.

Sherry retrieved two beers from the fridge and popped them open, just like she did almost every night, but underneath the calm and practiced movements her heart was pounding hard. She hadn’t thought Jake had more left to say on the subject. She wanted to hide the matter away, or sweep it out the door for good. She had enough on her mind without it.

They ate in silence, without even clicking their forks against their plates or their bottles against the table, as if they were both afraid that any sound at all would upset the uneasy ceasefire. The carbonnade was good, Sherry noticed, but not the best Jake had ever made. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but she forced herself to eat it all.

She needed time to think over her next move, she told herself. But in fact she was hardly thinking of anything at all. Her head was awash in white noise, static that she could not clear. Until Jake did the job for her.

“I was just thinking,” he said tentatively. “They must have known each other. Your dad and mine.”

“So?” Sherry said.

“So, don’t you think that’s kind of funny?”

“Funny how?”

“I mean, not the laughing kind of funny,” Jake amended quickly. “The kind of funny that means strange.”

Sherry was quiet for a moment, thinking it over. She had never really contemplated it before, but it was an odd coincidence. She racked her brain for a logical explanation to her first meeting with Jake, even one that was pure conspiracy, and yet she came up lacking.

“Maybe so,” she said.

Later, she would think that if Jake had left it there the whole argument would have faded from memory. She wouldn’t have even minded him following up on his harebrained inheritance scheme, as long as he didn’t try to involve her in it.

But instead, Jake said, “Did you ever meet him? My dad, I mean.”

Sherry flinched as if she had been struck. Jake saw that he had made a grave miscalculation with that question, and he began to fumble out an apology. “Babe, I didn’t mean that. What I meant to say was—“

“I met him,” Sherry said sharply. Her voice had not seemed very loud by her own estimation, but Jake’s mouth snapped shut and he shrank in his seat as if she had shouted.

“My parents had him over for Thanksgiving once,” she said. “I wasn’t very old, but I was old enough to know that they were doing it out of pity, and maybe a sense of duty. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Every holiday in my house was the same. We got out the fine china, and we had a huge meal brought in by a catering company. We went through all the motions without understanding, or even asking ourselves, why things were that way.”

“Sherry, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” Jake said, but as he spoke she realized that he would not have tried to stop her it if she hadn’t been talking about herself, her own awkward history. That wasn’t what he had asked, and she was ashamed that she had brought it up.

“I remember he was tall, and very careful in his movements. I thought he looked stiff, like he would snap if you bent him even a few inches in either direction. After dinner, my parents told me to go upstairs and play, but I didn’t. I sat on the landing over the living room and listened to them discuss work. That was all they had to talk about together. I don’t mean office gossip, either. Just projects, and deadlines, and reports.”

Sherry sighed. She realized she was staring down at her plate, and the ruins of the meal smeared across it, and she knew she had done it to escape Jake’s eyes.

“If you want me to tell you that your father would have loved you if he had known you, or that he was a decent man trapped in a difficult situation, or anything like that, I can’t do it. I don’t think I would be telling the truth if I did. Because while I sat there and I listened, I realized that he didn’t even love his work, not like my dad did. My father gave everything he had to the job, until he had run dry. Wesker, though, there was nothing giving about him. With him, it was more like he let that company take from him, even though he knew that one day they would get around to picking his bones clean.”

It took her a long time to realize that Jake was not going to answer her. He sat perfectly still in his chair, and Sherry could not say what he was feeling save that the emotion must have been a powerful one.

“Is that what you wanted to know?” she said quietly.

Without a word, Jake got up from the table and he walked out of the room.

***

Wesker awoke from one of his uneasy periods of semi-consciousness that were part dream and part hallucination and he knew at once that the worst was behind him. His body still burned with fever, but he felt a change in it, as if the fire within now blazed with a purpose. A cleansing flame, driving the infection out.

Slowly, systematically, he took account of his position. He still could not see, but he could hear very clearly. The room was alive with the hum of machinery and the rattle of recycled air. His sense of smell was dulled considerably, but he could detect the pungent odor of disinfectant and the aloe in the lotion an orderly smeared four times a day, without tenderness, over his burns.

His tongue was dry in his mouth, like a scrap of leather. He forced it to move, working up a pittance of saliva, and he ran it over the place where his upper lip should have been and found only the inflexible edge of a layer of scar tissue. Then he pressed the tip up against his teeth, counting only seven of them, but another three just beginning to sprout from his gums.

He wanted to try moving. It had been a long time since he had attempted it, and his early efforts had been abortive and directionless, driven by pain and by fear rather than logic and reason. Whatever he found out, at least he would know something definite about his condition. It was a positive development either way, he tried to tell himself, but in fact the thought that he might be permanently crippled or paralyzed or maimed terrified him.

When Wesker tried to imagine himself confined to a bed, at the mercy of quack scientists, he could not picture it properly. He could not conceive of himself robbed of either his great strength or his great intellect. He had come to rely too much on the first, and to take the second for granted.

He had always conisdered himself as a brave man, but as he lay there, trying to work up the courage to test the movement of a toe, a finger, he understood for the first time that all his most memorable acts of daring had been driven by desperation, not true fortitude.

Then he thought of Zaire in the late 70s. He had been there to conduct research for his graduate thesis on one of the first major outbreaks of Ebola. Nowadays, everyone knew about Ebola, but at the time it had still retained an element of mystery in the Western medical world. A demon virus that killed in a matter of days, leaving behind bloody wreckage where once the orderly networks of the body had been.

To Wesker, who was sixteen and, he knew now, naïve as a boy years younger than that, there had been a touch of the romantic about the whole thing. Here, after all these centuries, was a completely new and unquantified way to die.

As soon as it had become clear to his father and the others on the Umbrella Board of Directors that he would survive the experiments conducted on him in childhood, it was decided that Wesker was going to have to start pulling his own weight as soon as possible. The Umbrella Corporation did not give handouts, and had in fact logged and recorded every dime spent on the upbringing of the Wesker Children. Once it had been determined that he would be a human asset in addition to a material one, Wesker became well-acquainted with how much he was hurting Umbrella’s bottom line by his wasteful insistence on being fed and clothed.

He had never starved, nothing so dramatic as all that. But he had always lived with the knowledge that his continued existence was a series of impersonal red marks in an anonymous ledger.

Academics had always been important in the household where he grew up. Wesker had learned Latin and French alongside English, and some of his earliest memories were of being tutored in grammar, logic, and geometry. Even music and art had not escaped the scope of his Classical education. He had not played the piano in decades, but locked away in his muscles was the somewhat embarrassing memory of how to pick out a rather stiff an inexpressive _Arabesque No. 1_.

However, after the other children had disappeared, the subjects in which he was tutored had taken a sharp turn in the direction of the hard sciences. He’d had some leeway in choosing which department of the great corporation he would join when he came of age, but he had found himself drawn to virology right from the start.

Something in those tiny and ever-mutating forms appealed to him. They were too small; you couldn’t see them. The only reason anyone even knew they were there at all was because they were able to hurl sub-microscopic particles at them and measure where they struck. They existed, unseen, in everything, a part of everything, interwoven into the destiny of all life on earth right down to its very genetic code.

It was something like that, something half-formed and beautiful, that had convinced him to fly halfway around the world to investigate an outbreak of a disease known officially to only about a thousand people outside of West Africa. The Red Cross and MSF volunteers who were already there didn’t have much patience for his presence, his wide-eyed wonder at the world outside his father’s estate. But Wesker could place an IV with a steady hand, and he could stomach the sight of a good deal of blood, so they kept him on, wearily tolerated.

He stayed for six months during the hottest part of the year. More than 200 people died, and there hadn’t been a thing that could have been done for any of them. Wesker felt no guilt over the things he had seen, and he was not haunted by the faces of the people who had died. To him, the disease had never had a human face at all.

Medical workers were high risk for contracting Ebola, they had warned him when he first arrived. Wesker hadn’t been worried. He knew by that point that no virus could touch him.

But a few weeks after he arrived back in Raccoon City, he began to get terrible headaches. They came during the day, when the sun was brightest, but they didn’t fade even when night fell. The light hurt his eyes and made dark spots dance in his vision. He got into the habit of wearing sunglasses, as much to hide the dark shadows that had formed in the pits of his eyes as to protect his retinas from the light.

His body was wracked by chills and when he was alone with no one in front of whom he had to maintain his composure, his teeth chattered uncontrollably. His joints ached, and his appetite shrunk to almost nothing.

He waited two months for the fever to break and for things to go back to normal, but in the end it broke him. He collapsed in his father’s library, spilling an armload of microbiology books onto the thick carpet. Though he was not unconscious, he was far from aware. He hung suspended in a gray haze, like amniotic fluid.

Two months went by like that. When he was finally well enough to carry on a conversation, the man who called himself his father came to see him.

Hadn’t he taken anti-malarial drugs? Didn’t he know it was a parasite, not a virus?

Wesker insisted that he had, but he could tell from the way Spencer looked at him, that mixture of disgust at how badly he lied and annoyance at having to retabulate Wesker’s annual expenses, that he had not believed him for a second.

The truth was, Wesker had stopped taking the pills after the first month in Zaire. Some of the side effects of the new drug were nightmares, paranoia, hallucinations. They had made him inefficient, and, in a moment of weakness, they had made him afraid.

It was the same oppressive, humiliating fear now that made him unwilling to test the extent of his injuries. Wesker abhorred that weakness in himself, and he clenched his right fist all at once, just to prove that he could.

He was surprised, pleasantly so, by how easily the joints moved. Until recently, the tissue had been completely destroyed, but now his hand moved easily, almost as if it had never been damaged.

Next, he tried the left hand. It was not healing as quickly, but he could feel that regeneration was smooth. It felt like his limb, but of course he couldn’t be sure of that. He might have been a monster for all he knew; he might have mutated beyond recognition.

There was nothing he could do about that now. It was best to focus on what was within his power. After methodically testing each finger and finding seven of them in good working order, with the full range of motion they ought to have had, Wesker went on to try his wrists. He found he could rotate them, albeit stiffly, but when he tried to raise his hands a steady weight bore down on them.

Not the wrists themselves, he realized, something around the wrists. He was cuffed and shackled to the bed.

A shiver went through him as the full extent of his situation sunk in.

He was restrained. They still considered him a threat.


	8. Chapter 8

When Jake woke up the next morning, Sherry was already gone. She hadn’t come in the night before, and he was ashamed that he had slept so soundly having slept alone. He’d more or less gotten over what she had said at dinner, though there was still a sore spot upon his ego like the ache of a healing bruise. Sherry had been honest with him, and he appreciated that, but he knew that she’d said what she had said because she knew it would get to him. She packed a pretty mean punch for such a cute little thing, and that story about Wesker had definitely been intended to hit below the belt.

Not since he had been very young and very stupid about the true workings of the world had Jake allowed himself to imagine that it was only his father’s ignorance of his existence that had kept them from settling down as a happy family. However, from the way Carla had laid it out for him in Lianshang, he’d gotten the impression that Wesker was a man with a dream, a vision of the world in which there was no place for either Jake or his mother. He could grudgingly respect that. No matter how twisted Wesker’s ideals were, at least they were his own. Something to give form and weight to the specter that had haunted Jake’s life for years.

But the person Sherry had described didn’t even have that going for him. It seemed inconceivable to him that a practical, straightforward woman like his mom could ever have seen anything to admire in a man like that: bloodless, administrative, and as lost as all the rest of them.

Jake had always imagined that she had loved his absent father immensely, and that had been a comfort to him. Now, however, he was forced to confront the thought that perhaps her great passion had in fact been nothing but sympathy. She had taken pity on a man who had been unwilling, perhaps outright incapable, of returning the sentiment. When she had needed him the most, he hadn’t even had the balls to pull himself away from work, unwilling to look up even for a second from the path that had been set for him.

It made Jake’s stomach flop over to think about it. He had no way of knowing if any of it was true, if the impressions of a ten-year-old girl – even one as self-possessed and observant as Sherry – could be trusted. And yet the old image of his father that he had been carrying around with him for the last year was already tearing itself down, rebuilding itself into a new form.

He couldn’t help it. Having never known the man, he couldn’t help but create him, over and over again, ever since he had been a kid.

In the back of the closet in their bedroom, Jake had stashed a wooden cigar box full of things from his old life that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to part with.  Tucked inside it amongst the spent shell casings from battles he barely remembered and the old papers that still bore the faded marks of his mother’s strong, unembellished handwriting, he found the newspaper photo of his father.

Even on a good day, just remembering that he had the picture in the house made Jake feel guilty. He never would have gotten it out to look at if he hadn’t been alone, but he knew that he had to see Wesker’s face. Something about it held the key to understanding who he had really been. But it seemed that the longer Jake looked the less clear the image became, as if those eyes that he had once thought stared out at the world so boldly now shrunk away from it.

Upset without really understanding why, Jake shoved the photo back into the box and slammed the lid. He thought about calling Sherry, just to apologize, to tell her what an asshole he was, but he knew that by now she would be hard at work and she might not want to be interrupted. Everything would blow over in time, but it was best to leave her alone to work through things by herself.

He pulled out his phone and ran his finger over the smooth ridges of the buttons. He couldn’t call Sherry, but he felt like he had to talk to someone. Without even thinking that he would do it, he punched in Leon’s number.

Leon picked up on the fourth ring.  “Yeah?” he rasped.

“Sorry, is this a bad time?” Jake said. Then he hastily added, “It’s Jake, by the way.”

“I know,” Leon replied. He coughed dryly. “What’s up?”

“I guess it’s early, isn’t it?” Jake said. “Sorry about that.”

“I was awake. Don’t worry.”

“Listen, Leon, I called because…” Here, Jake hesitated. He really had no idea why he had dialed Leon’s number, except that he had been pretty sure he would pick up. “I was wondering if you wanted to hang out sometime?”

“Hang out?” Leon repeated.

“You know, do something together. I’ve been feeling a little cooped up, to be honest…”

“Oh, _hang out_ ,” Leon said. “Yeah, I can do that. Why don’t you come over to my part of town around three?  I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“All right,” Jake replied. It seemed that he felt all the strength rush out of him, and he sat down hard on the unmade bed. “I’ll see you.”

***

That afternoon, he met Leon at a little dive near the metro stop. It was dark inside despite the brightness of the day, and it gave Jake the impression of great age but very little history. Leon was already there at one of the tables in the back, with a mostly empty beer on the table in front of him. The place was dead except for a youngish bartender scrubbing glasses and a couple of blue-collar types watching NASCAR on the TV behind the bar.

“Hey,” Jake said tentatively as he slid in across from Leon. The bartender came over and set a pint glass in front of both of them.

“I ordered for you,” Leon explained when he noticed the mild surprise on Jake’s face. He finished off his own beer, and handed the empty glass back to the bartender.

“You two want to look at a menu?” she sighed.

Jake looked to Leon for an answer, only to find that Leon was looking at him the same way. “We’re fine for right now,” Leon said, as quickly and decisively as he would have made a call in the middle of a firefight.

The bartender glances between them again, and turned sharply on her heels.

Jake laughed uneasily. “Why do I get the impression that was incredibly awkward?”

“Your social skills are a little atrophied,” Leon said, taking a drink of his beer. “But mine aren’t much better. I guess that’s why we’re here, right? Hanging out.”

Jake’s hand closed convulsively around the glass, and he lifted it to his lips to take a long swallow. It was pretty good. Dark, with anise and something else in it.

“That’s not why we’re here,” he admitted quietly.

“All right,” Leon said.

“All right, as in you don’t give a shit about my problems?”

“All right, as in you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”

“It’s just that I kind of had a fight with Sherry last night,” Jake said hesitantly.

Leon watched him closely. Even when he paused to drink, he was watching him. “About what?”

“My dad,” Jake said. “My fucking dad, of all things. I told her I wanted to look into getting my inheritance, and she didn’t like it.”

“She doesn’t want to dig up the past,” Leon said.

“It’s not like I’m in love with the idea,” Jake replied. “I just want what’s mine. And it’s not like we can’t use the money. She wouldn’t even think about it, though.”

“Sherry has a lot of secrets, a lot of things she doesn’t talk about with anyone.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Jake snapped.

“I know you do,” Leon said. “But just hear me out. She deals with things in her own way. She goes off and thinks things over and gets everything squared away in her mind just how she likes it. If you said something to upset that balance, I can see why she was mad.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it was right or wrong, I’m just saying I can see it.”

Jake scowled. “I guess. I just wish she would have taken me seriously at least.”

“She took you seriously,” Leon said. “Or else she wouldn’t have gotten mad. I’m taking you seriously, too. So why don’t you tell me how you’re going to get your hands on this money you think belongs to you?”

Jake felt an uneasy suspicion growing inside of him, the unshakable fear that Leon would brush him off or, worse still, laugh at him. He tilted his chin back in a gesture of defiance and he said, “The way I figure it, I need two things. DNA evidence that shows I’m related to him, and some kind of proof that he’s actually dead. Both of those are tough to come by these days, though. Someone somewhere along the line did a pretty good job covering up the fact that he ever existed, but I thought that Sherry could help. Maybe through her work…”

“Don’t ask her,” Leon said. “It will only end up being painful for both of you.”

“I know,” Jake sighed. It was exactly what he had expected Leon to say. It was only what he said next that came as a surprise.

“Let me call in some favors first,” Leon continued. “I know some people who might be able to help us.”

***

By the time Jake got home, he felt a lot better, though he knew nothing had really been resolved. Leon could make all the promises he wanted, and he might have the best of intentions with them, but Jake thought he could be forgiven if he didn’t trust him just like that. It didn’t take a domesticated mercenary with daddy issues to see that Leon was a trustworthy, good person – effortlessly trustworthy and infuriatingly good – but Jake had been burned before.

Still, talking seemed to have put things in perspective and helped Jake get some shit straight in his own mind. The four beers he’d put away certainly hadn’t hurt either. He had a good middle-of-the-road buzz, which was right where he wanted to be. The first couple of drinks had even loosened him up a little, and towards the end he and Leon had, fumblingly, managed something like a normal conversation.

Back at the apartment, Jake flopped on the sofa and switched on the TV. Five minutes later, he was out like a light.

He woke up in the dark, disoriented, and he flailed around in an embarrassing and amorphous panic for a few seconds before tumbling off the sofa and into the blue wedge of light from the television. It was still on, but the program was no longer an early afternoon game show. It had segued at some point into one of the night time reality shows.

Jake reached up and fumbled his hand along the edge of the table until he found the remote, then he switched the TV off.

“Sherry?” he called, but he knew even as he said it that she wasn’t home. He pulled his phone out and looked at it and saw that it was already close to nine. She was late, but she’d been this late before, a few times. Jake didn’t know whether to take it as a good sign or a bad one that she hadn’t hurried home to talk about what had happened the night before.

Rubbing his elbow, sore from where he had banged it on a table leg on his way off the couch, Jake stood up. He wandered into the kitchen to get a glass of water to clean some of the cobwebs out of his mouth. While he drank it, he called Sherry.

The phone trilled for a while in his ear. Eventually, Sherry’s clipped and professional voicemail picked up, and Jake hung up on it.

Now, he was nervous, though he couldn’t say whether he had any real reason to be. He didn’t want to turn into one of those people who worried about every little thing, but Sherry might have at least called.

Annoyed, he dialed her number again. This time, the phone just rang and rang.

As soon as Jake ended the call, the phone buzzed in his hand.

“Hi,” said Sherry’s sheepish voice on the other end of the line. “I’m out with some friends. I didn’t notice how late it was.”

“Friends?” Jake echoed.

“From work. They invited me out.”

“Oh,” Jake said.

“Sorry I forgot to call,” Sherry said. “I just kept getting distracted.”

“It’s fine,” Jake said. “I was just wondering if you were okay.”

“I’m okay,” Sherry replied. “I’ll talk to you later.”

Jake was left holding a disconnected phone. Sherry had certainly sounded all right – normal – and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She had never gone out with friends from work before, at least not that he could remember, but he had never gone to a bar with Leon before so he supposed they were even there.

On impulse, Jake called her back. This time, Sherry picked up, and now he could hear the muffled sounds of voices and music. She really was out somewhere. He hadn’t realized until he had proof that he had doubted it.

“What did you forget?” she said, faintly amused.

“I just wanted to ask, are you mad at me?”

“Mad?” Sherry sounded irritated. If she hadn’t been mad before, she might be if this conversation kept up too long. “Why would I be mad?”

“About last night. I’m sorry I brought it up…”

“No,” she said. “I’m not mad about that. But I don’t know what else there is to say. Are you mad?”

“No,” Jake said. “I’m not.”

“Then let’s just forget it happened. Listen, I just noticed the time. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get the last train. One of the girls said I can sleep at her place, though. Will you be okay if I don’t come home tonight?”

“I’ll be fine,” Jake said. He frowned a little. “Have fun, babe. You certainly deserve it.”

Sherry hung up without a goodbye.


	9. Chapter 9

“How do you know they’re from her?” was the first thing Leon said after he read the series of text messages.

Jake was hunched on the couch, a warm beer that he had forgotten to drink clutched in one fist. He was slow to realize that Leon was speaking to him, slow to comprehend what the words had meant. “Who else would they be from?” he said slowly, his voice seeming slurred to his own ears.

“I don’t know,” Leon replied.

“They’re from her,” Jake said, and he felt Leon watching him skeptically over the top of the phone.

“You’re sure? It’s important that you be sure.”

Jake tightened his grip on the bottle, and he felt the label slide loosely beneath his fingers, peeling back from the sweating glass. Jake felt tired, jumpy, like his skin was about to slide off his bones with no more resistance than a well-handled label off a bottle of beer.  He was itching for a fight, and the only thing that stopped him from leaping to his feet and popping Leon one right across his handsome, weary, concerned, no longer youthful face was the fact that his fists were slow to get the message.

“I’m sure,” he said quietly.

“Okay.” Leon nodded slowly, taking it in. His eyes went back to the screen, and he scrolled again through the messages. Jake had read them over so many times since they had come in, the night before that he felt he now knew them by heart.

_Hi babe_ , ran the first one. _I’m sorry you had to find out about everything like this. It’s not that I don’t want to talk, but I can’t. I’m in the airport right now, and I’m going to tell you some things that I don’t want_ —

Here, the character limit on the first text ran out, and the second one picked it up. There were four of them in all. They’d appeared one after the other at 3:00 am, a series of beeps jerking Jake rudely out of sleep.

The message went on: -- _overheard. (BTW, I’m not at Dulles anymore, so don’t get any ideas about going over there and looking for me.) My flight leaves in 45 minutes. I don’t know when I’m coming back. I’ve gotten a hold of something big this time. You can’t come with me, but don’t worry. I won’t be alone. Take care of yourself. Don’t get too lonely. Try not to worry. Talk to Leon if you need anything. Get the money, and whatever else you need, from that jerk that didn’t deserve to have you as a son. See you soon._

There was one last message amended to the thread. This one had come in late, between when Jake had started reading the note and when he had frantically dialed Sherry’s number and gotten, already, only the three ascending tones of a disconnected line.

This last text was brief, and without the careful capitals and punctuation she had surely added in an attempt to convey seriousness. It had been dashed off quickly, in a style he instantly recognized as Sherry’s: _love u bb xoxo_.

It was only those final words, added as an afterthought to the message she had no doubt agonized over, mentally drafting it for hours on the sleepless red-eye flight that had taken her somewhere beyond his reach, that had allowed Jake to answer with complete certainty when Leon had asked whether Sherry had really sent the messages.  Those same words now made him cringe in shame as he saw Leon skim past them, giving them no more mind than he would a reminder to pick up milk from the store, or to drop off the dry cleaning.

“Okay,” Leon said briskly, looking up from the screen. “What do we know?”

Jake’s head came up sharply. “That Sherry’s fucking gone somewhere alone. That’s what we know.”

“No,” Leon said. “That’s only part of what we know. We know the two of you fought.”

“That’s not why she left,” Jake said, so quickly that it was only after it was out that he was sure he really believed it. “That couldn’t possibly be why.”

“I agree,” Leon said. “Sherry doesn’t run, even when she probably should. She’s not wired that way.”

“You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that,” Jake muttered. “Since you’re the foremost authority on my fucking girlfriend and all.”

Leon looked a little startled at the sudden outburst, but not particularly bothered by it. Eventually, Jake slumped back in his seat, defeated.

“Well, kid,” Leon said, making another cursory pass through the messages on Jake’s phone. “I’m pretty much stumped.”

He handed the phone back, and Jake took it with numb fingers. “Excuse me?”

“I don’t know what to do.  She didn’t leave anything to go on, and she says right here she doesn’t want anyone coming after her. Maybe we ought to just sit tight for now.”

Jake looked up at him blankly, stubbornly refusing to comprehend those words. “You’re giving up on her?” he said at last.

“I’m not giving up on anyone,” Leon said. “But Sherry generally knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t want our help on this one, and I think the sooner we get used to the idea, the better off we’ll all be. Besides, she’s playing this pretty close to the hilt.”

“What happened to those friends of yours?” Jake gasped. “The ones who you were so sure were going to be able to dig up all that stuff on my… on Wesker.”

“Not friends,” Leon replied. “Just one friend. And even that might be pushing it. It’s more accurate to say that she owes me a big favor. Anyway, it’s not the same thing. Sherry works in intelligence too. She knows how to play the game. If she doesn’t want to be found, she can probably hide for a long time.”

“Shit,” Jake said, for lack of anything better. “Fuck. Goddamn it.”

“Think about it this way,” Leon went on. “Even if you do manage to track her down, I doubt she’ll be particularly happy to see you.”

“What if she’s in trouble, though?”

“What if she is?” Leon said. “Do you think you’re going to find out where she is right in the nick of time? Sweep in at the last second and rescue her? No.  It would never happen like that.”

Jake paused. He wasn’t exactly on top of his game at the moment, but he could tell that he’d touched a nerve. For all his mental posturing a minute ago, all his fantasies of recklessly swinging his fists, when he actually had a chance to hurt someone, Jake backed off.

“So what do we do?” he said quietly.

 “You keep your phone on,” Leon said. “Let me know if she calls. I’ll keep following up on Wesker.”

“About that,” Jake said. “I don’t know if I have the stomach for it right now.”

“You might change your mind,” Leon said. “Keep your options open because you might change your mind yet.”

***

It wasn’t long after Leon had left that Jake realized he had been right. He didn’t want to sit around here worrying and waiting for a call from Sherry that might not come. He had to do something, and it might as well involve tracking down his father’s fortune.

That didn’t exactly make him feel good, but he was pretty well resigned to it when Leon dropped by for the second time that day. He didn’t even bother calling ahead; he just showed up on Jake’s doorstep, laying impatiently on the buzzer.

When Jake answered the door, Leon didn’t waste any time saying hello. He just thrust a folder into Jake’s hands.

“I got it,” he announced. His cheeks were a little flushed, and his eyes had a bright, glassy sheen to them which suggested he’d been drinking. Jake glanced at him warily, and then flipped the folder open.

The document on top was a printout of the results of a genetic screening. Jake had seen enough daytime talk shows to recognize the variable columns of a paternity test. There were two sets of genes on the page, with penciled-in check marks over some of the columns noting the ones that matched up. At the bottom were a few handwritten lines in an impenetrable doctor scrawl, though their meaning was easy enough to guess.  

“This is me, I guess?” Jake said, pointed at the top test result. He tapped his finger against the bottom one. “And him?”

“Other way around,” Leon said. “I don’t really understand the finer points of it, but I’ve been assured it’ll hold up in court.”

“Assured by who?”

“Harper.”

“Who?”

“Helena Harper.” When the name was met with only a blank look from Jake, Leon added, “You met her.”

“I don’t remember,” Jake admitted.

“It was a tough time, I guess,” Leon said. “Anyway, we can trust her.”

When Jake made no move to further search the folder, Leon snatched it out of his hands. He was impatient, which wasn’t like him. He must have been pretty proud of whatever was in there, or else he was nervous about lingering over it for too long.

“Hey,” Jake said. “Are you going to get in trouble for having this?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Leon replied. He turned the page, with a frantic jerk of his hand. Awfully eager to get this over with, Jake thought. Or maybe he was just ready for something to happen, anything to happen.  Even if it meant having to deal with Umbrella again, and unearth all those old, familiar terrors.

“These are all the records she could dig up on Wesker’s movements during his last days alive,” Leon said as he flipped through a collection of dubious drone surveillance photos, indistinct blobs of color against a landscape more like a crude sketch of a desert than any real place on earth. The next page was a heavily edited internal memo, a few lines of text hacked to pieces by black bars. There wasn’t even a name or a date left uncensored.

“Not much to write home about, is it?” Jake said.

“She said it was all she could find.” Leon shrugged, and turned to the next page. It was a record of calls made from a satellite phone. There were only about three or four of them, spaced out over the course of a week. They were all less than five minutes in length. Just the bare minimum required to get the information out, Jake thought. Never a word wasted.

Leon went on. “It looks like he changed phones often, but he used this one right up until the week he died.”

“What about these numbers he called?” Jake said.

“Disposable phones and calling services,” Leon said. “Harper told me that the BSAA agents assigned to clean up after the mission have been following up on them, but if they have any leads they aren’t sharing them.”

“Figures,” Jake said. Just the mention of the BSAA made him imagine an army of Chris Redfields, marching in smug lockstep all over the autonomy of any country that was unfortunate enough to get in their way.

Leon glanced at him with a look that was more bemused than anything, and he flipped to the last page in the folder. It was a statement from the International Bank of Switzerland, three years’ worth of charges to an account in the name of A. Wesker.

“Those are his personal finances,” Leon said. “He had a couple of dummy companies set up in his name which was how he moved around large sums, and he used cash a lot, but Harper says it looks like he did some of his buying from this account. I figured that, between that and the phone record, we might be able to make a pretty good case that he’s dead based on the fact that he hasn’t bought anything or talked to anyone recently.”

Jake was barely listening. He was reading the bank statement, conscious as always of the movement of money, but now of something else, too. In late 2007, Wesker’s account had been almost drained. He’d bought a ticket to Florence with what he had left, and shortly after that there was a large deposit.

It was enough to make you puke, Jake thought. That trip to Italy had been Wesker’s last chance, and whoever he’d met there had been his last hope. It had worked out for him in the end, it seemed, in the form of a payday big enough to buy Jake’s condo about five times over and then throw in a new sports car for good measure.

Still, he must have been pretty desperate to attempt it. The two purchases right after the big payoff from his mysterious benefactor were from London tailors, as if he’d had nothing but the clothes on his back.

Leon was looking at him expectantly, but Jake neither remembered nor cared what they were talking about. He flipped the bank statement over angrily, reading down the column of charges from the weeks leading up to Wesker’s death. All at once, he froze.

 “What do you think?” Leon prompted.

Jake stabbed his finger against the last withdrawal on the page. “Look at this,” he said.

A good sized sum of money – close to $10,000 – had been transferred out of the account. It wouldn’t have been out of place if the transaction had not been dated October of 2009.

It was more than six months after Wesker had died.

***

About the last person Jake wanted to see in the wake of everything that had happened was Chris Redfield. He didn’t expect anyone, not even Leon, to pat him on the head and coddle him about Sherry being gone, but Chris was like the anti-sympathy. He’d gotten a lot better since Lianshang, Leon assured him, but all Jake could remember of their brief and thoroughly unpleasant meeting was that Chris was gruff, surly, macho. The sound of his voice was like sandpaper against the raw patches on Jakes ego. Constipated sandpaper, at that.

All of that was true, and yet the fact remained that Chris was the only one who knew what had really happened to Wesker. At the very least, Jake told himself as he trailed behind Leon, dragging his feet like a little kid trying to make himself late for church, he ought to know about the weird activity on Wesker’s bank account.

Leon hadn’t exactly insisted that he be allowed to set up this meeting, but he had jumped at the chance to. He was overeager, maybe even a little pushy. More than just a well-meaning acquaintance trying to take Jake’s mind off his troubles.

He was getting something out of this. Jake didn’t resent him for that; he just wearily accepted it, the same way he had accepted this meeting with Chris.

Leon hadn’t told him the whole thing was going to seem so underhanded, though. He brought Jake to a dark little diner on the north side of DC. It was a long drive, even in the middle of the day, and they did most of it in silence. Jake split his time between gazing out the window, seeing nothing of the buildings they passed, and uneasily watching Leon’s still profile. His jaw was like granite, his eyes steely and unblinking. It was kind of scary, like a creepy mask plastered over the face of a man Jake had only ever known as amiable enough, if not a little reserved.

When they got to the diner – a cramped, greasy dump off the highway – Leon scanned the parking lot with a practiced eye. Jake wondered what he was looking for, but he figured it was better if he didn’t ask. They went inside, and Leon took a seat by the window.

Jake took his phone out and set it close to his elbow. He was still hoping to get word from Sherry.

“You okay?” Leon asked abruptly. He seemed to have to choke the words out, as if his granitey jaw had grown unaccustomed to speech.

“Yeah, fine,” Jake said. “I just don’t like all this _X-Files_ crap. I mean, he could have just called or come by or something.”

Leon didn’t answer. When the waitress ventured out from behind the counter, he flagged her down and ordered coffee. Jake sipped his in silence. Leon didn’t seem to want to talk shit about Chris, which was about the only topic of conversation Jake could handle at the moment. He’d heard they were friends, or something like that, so maybe it was best if he kept his opinion of the man to himself.

The roar of a diesel engine announced Chris’ arrival as he pulled into the diner parking lot. He was driving one of those big lifted pick-ups. It looked like he’d done a fair amount of aftermarket work on it, too.

So much for keeping a low profile, Jake thought.

He watched out of the corner of his eye as Chris parked and walked up to the door, as he found his way to their table and hesitated, as if he couldn’t decide whether it was more unbearable to sit next to Jake or to sit across from him and have to make eye contact.

Eventually, he slid in next to Leon.

“Hey,” Leon said. “Long time no see.”

“Likewise,” Chris said. “What’s all this about?”

“Jake has something he wants to show you.”

He wasn’t thrilled with the way Leon made it sound like this whole thing had been his idea, but Jake dutifully fished out the folder of documents and set it on the table. He ran Chris through the contents as quickly as he could, but when he glanced up at him Chris’ expression had not changed. His eyes were straight ahead, not looking at the papers in front of him. Jake hadn’t been watching him, so he couldn’t say if he had looked at them at all.

Chris waited quietly, patiently, for Jake to finish, and then he said, “No.”

Jake opened his mouth to respond, but he shut it again when he realized he couldn’t think of single thing to say. He couldn’t imagine fighting with Chris, but he didn’t want to cave in and accept his answer without a fight either.

“Chris, look—“ Leon said after a moment.

Chris cut him off. “Don’t. I know you think you’re helping him, but this isn’t going to help anyone. That man is dead, and the best thing we can all do is make sure that he stays that way.”

“I know he’s dead,” Jake said. “He’s dead, and I’m glad. I just want proof that he’s really gone. A signed statement, a death certificate. Anything.”

“No,” Chris said again. “I’m not getting involved.”

“Then why did you drag us all the way out here?” Jake said. “Just to prove that we’d do what you said?”

“I wanted to see what you had that you thought was so important.” He took hold of the corner of the folder, pinching it between two fingers with a good degree more distaste than he would have handled a smear of roadkill, and he flipped it shut.

“Fine,” Jake said. And just so Chris didn’t think he was intimidated, he added, “Whatever.”

Leon watched Chris get up from the table. His eyes were tense, brows contracted, as if he were riding out a sudden stab of pain. “Guess you’re still the biggest man in the business, Chris,” he said. Jake didn’t think he’d imagined the regret in his voice.

“Guess I am,” Chris said, and then he left. Neither of them looked up, but they heard his truck roar out of the parking lot and down the empty highway.

Leon and Jake sipped their coffee in silence for a second, before Jake finally said, “He really didn’t have to drag us out here like this. He’s just swinging his dick around.”

When Leon said nothing, Jake started to feel uncomfortable about it. He and Chris trusted each other, or at least they had once. That was how Leon made it seem. “Anyway,” Jake went on. “He was right about one thing, we probably should stop following up on this. Maybe it’s best to just forget the whole thing, right?”

“He knows something,” Leon said quietly.

“What?”

“About the bank account. I didn’t think it was anything unusual, but he does. He knows there’s something wrong.”


	10. Chapter 10

They kept him hooked up to an IV at all times, one with a release that was controlled remotely, from beyond the reinforced one-way mirror that took up one wall of his cell. Wesker always knew when they were coming in because his right arm would begin to itch. As soon as he felt that, he had to brace himself, because it was not long before the itching became a slow burn, like fire creeping under his skin. Mercifully, that sensation never lasted long. Within minutes, the chemical cocktail reached his brain and sealed it off in a soft layer of dampening gauze.

He guessed that they were giving him Doxacarum to paralyze his muscles. He felt it when it took hold, like a switch flipped between his brain and his nervous system. He couldn’t guess the size of the dose, but it must have been massive.  Ninety seconds after they turned on the drip, his heart rate slowed to a crawl and his lungs felt like they were gradually petrifying in his chest. But there must have been a pretty healthy shot of morphine in the mix too, because after the first few minutes even the pitiful struggles of his body because mere vague curiosities, viewed through hazy glass from a long way off.

Wesker wanted to stay proud, to hold that he would rather endure the whole spectrum of agonies these charlatans might inflict on him than spend a single moment suffering the humiliation of being drugged. He knew, though, that he was only trying to salve his ego. Before, he would have believed it, would have welcomed anything that they could have thrown at him, but he had been naïve back then. He had known nothing of true pain.

He heard the door unlatch, and then the light tap of high heels on the linoleum floor. It was the dark haired woman, Jessica.  Of the half dozen people with clearance to visit him in this windowless lab, she was the one he least wanted to see. Wesker had gathered that she was ambitious, and she cared for no one; she reminded him too much of himself.

The last time she had been here, looking at the new pink flesh that had grown in under his bandages, Wesker had moved his hand. It had been more of a twitch than a deliberate movement, and when he tried again to replicate it, he could not. Jessica had noticed, however, and she calmly reached up to adjust a lever on the side of his drip. Instantly, a second dose of Doxacarum flooded his system. Wesker’s heart fluttered, and his breathing ground to a halt.

Jessica watched him for what felt like a long time, watched him as if she intended, on nothing more than a whim, to let him die.

Wesker glared at her, unable to move, unable even to speak so that he could tell her, with his final breath, what he would do if their positions were reversed. He knew that he would die without so much as a whisper, and the horrible injustice of it all made his eyes cloud with furious tears.  All was dark, dark and receding.

And then Jessica reached up and flipped the switch on his IV off. She drew a long syringe out of her pocket and slipped the tip of it lovingly between two ribs and administered a shot of adrenaline that made his lungs contract, sucking in a gulp of fresh air like liquid fire. For any other man, it would have been too late, but Wesker felt the familiar creep of the virus in his veins, shocking his system, dragging him back…

Jessica was still watching him with mild curiosity. She picked up his chart from the foot of the bed and scratched some notes.

“That was the first test,” she said mildly, and then she smiled at him before she turned to go.

Wesker didn’t know how long it had been since he had seen her last. Days, he supposed, but it was impossible to tell. He tried to count the hours, but he always grew confused and lost track.  Regardless of the details, she was back now. Wesker knew that did not bode well for him. Carefully, as carefully as he could, he began to shore his body up against whatever indignities and outrages might follow.

Jessica stepped inside and crossed the floor with sure steps and not a flicker or hesitation. She was no longer afraid of him, and one day that might prove to be a mistake, but that day would not be today. As she came closer, Wesker felt his muscles slithering and coiling uselessly inside the cage of his paralyzed limbs.

Beyond Jessica’s approaching shoulder, he saw Raymond slip through the door, turning his body sideways to squeeze through the smallest possible gap. Unlike his partner, he hung back. His mouth was twisted into a smirk that ran along well-trod lines, but his face was pale and faintly green.

There was still a poultice of bandages covering Wesker’s left shoulder, the final remnants of his long and excruciating recovery. Jessica used a scalpel to cut the bandages away and probed the area with the tips of her fingers. Though her hands were cold and without gentleness, there was no real pain when she touched him.

He had healed almost completely. The skin around the spot was raw and sensitive and new, but it was whole. It even impressed Wesker how far he had come, for he understood now how bad he had really been.

If Jessica was surprised by his progress, she didn’t show it, but she did let him know that she was pleased. One of her icy hands stroked his brow, and Wesker felt a little tug of resistance as her fingers snagged on his hair. He tried to roll his eyes upward to see it. He’d always thought his hair was one of the best of his many good features.

“You like that?” Jessica cooed. “You always did strike me as the type to get off on having his hair pulled.”

On the last word, she gave his hair a sharp yank that sent a jolt of pain through him.  His sight clouded, but it was only a physical reaction. He would not – indeed, could not – believe that he was crying, whether from pain, humiliation, or helpless fear.

Jessica’s mouth jerked into an unpleasant smile. She opened her fist over his face and let a shower of loose hair rain down on him. Gold, Wesker thought, and not without some measure of satisfaction. Just as it should have been.

“Fun,” Jessica said. “But it’s time to get down to business.”

She glanced back at Raymond who was standing with his back against the door as if he could sink though it.

“What are you doing, you big baby?” she said with an airy laugh. “Get over here.”

Raymond pushed away from the wall. There was something in his hand, something that knocked heavily against his leg when he walked. Wesker couldn’t get a good look at it.

“You sure about this?” he said. That same smirk was still riding high on his cupid’s bow lips, but now it seemed like an unconvincing mask stretched over the real face - undoubtedly twisted in horror – that lay beneath. Wesker was used to inspiring terror in people, and even sparking disgust, but this particular combination of the two was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He didn’t like it.

“I have a good feeling about it,” Jessica said. “I’m no scientist, but I’m willing to pull my weight around here. Are you?”

“Yeah,” Raymond said, but he made no move to come closer.

“You’re scared,” Jessica said.

“No.”

“Then you’re squeamish.” She laughed. “You find it cruel.”

“It is, isn’t it?” he replied.

“Whatever. I can’t think about it like that, not while there’s work to be done.  I’ll do it if you won’t. Hand me that chisel.”

There was a long padded armrest affixed to the side of the table Wesker was cuffed to. Jessica folded it out at a 90 degree angle, then she unshackled Wesker’s wrist and moved it into place. He tried to pull away, more out of habit than any real desire to rebel, but he only managed to make his arm tremble impotently a few times.

Jessica either didn’t notice or didn’t find it worthy of attention. For a moment, Wesker forwent rage and embarrassment in favor of the petty irritation at being ignored. Jessica stretched his arm out straight and strapped it down.

What happened next seemed to move very quickly in hindsight. Jessica lifted a heavy, stainless steel chisel and laid the tip against Wesker’s arm, midway between elbow and shoulder.  Wesker instantly recognized it as a rather obscure surgical tool, but even then he was slow to grasp what she had in mind. Before he could sort it out all out, Jessica raised a hammer over her head and brought it down hard on top of the chisel.

His humerus snapped, a clean and complete break, so sudden that didn’t even begin to feel the pain until well after he had taken stock of the blood dripping off the tip of the chisel, the awful racket the tools made as Jessica tossed them onto a steel medical table.

His stomach dropped. He could feel bile rising in his throat, but there was nothing in his digestive tract to expel. A red mist swam before his eyes, and his thoughts were buoyed between the disbelieving terror of consciousness and the merciful darkness of a dead faint.

He made a weak sound, low in the back of his throat, a kind of quiet, wet rattle that ceased as soon as it had begun. Wesker was glad for that. He had been ready for anything, braced against anything, save that pathetic animal noise that was not been able to control.

“That wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” Raymond said. “He barely put up a fuss at all. I got it next time, all right?”

He came forward to help Jessica arrange Wesker’s arm so it rested against his side once more. He was trying to make amends with Jessica, but he only ended up getting underfoot.

Jessica swatted him away and finished shackling Wesker’s wrist. Wesker’s fingers felt numb, and he could tell that his upper arm was swelling already from the way it pressed uncomfortably against the steel table.

“I want x-rays once a day,” Jessica said. “No, better make it twice a day.”

“Just how long do you think it’s going to take him to get his shit together?” Raymond said.

“All reports indicate that he used to be able to heal a break like that in a couple of hours. Now, who knows? I give it a couple weeks.”

“I sure could have used something like that the time I caught gonorrhea in FBC basic,” Raymond said.

They were heading towards the exit now, and Raymond’s laughter echoed back to Wesker from a long way off. It sounded genuine enough, but there was still a nervous edge to it.

When Jessica opened the door, a gust of cold air swept in, cooling the livid sweat on Wesker’s brow. Making him shiver, the way a human would.

His arm throbbed, and that too was a sensation he had not felt since shedding the last of his vestigial mortality. As was the fear that had begun to creep through him, black and implacable, threatening to blot out all else.

If only someone would come for him, he thought. If only someone would take him away from this place…

***

Three days after the meeting in the diner, Jake’s phone rang at two in the morning. He fumbled gracelessly off the couch and groped after the bright beacon of the screen.

“Sherry?” he said.

“No,” replied a voice on the other end of the line. “Sorry.”

It was Chris. Jake recognized him at once, though he’d certainly never given him this number. He was dismayed that Chris sounded neither surprised nor annoyed at Jake’s shrill and half-desperate way of saying his girlfriend’s name in response to a call from an unknown number in the middle of the night.

Leon had been right. Chris did know more than he was letting on.

“What do you want?” Jake said.

“I’ve been thinking about what you told me the other day.”

“And what?” Jake said. “You want to jerk me around some more?”

“There’s an old civilian compound out on the ice in Antarctica. It used to belong to Umbrella, but they abandoned it back in the 90’s. There’s been some activity there recently, though.”

“So?” Jake sniffed.

“So, I think you might find what you’re looking for there.”

Jake froze. He felt the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and a shiver worked its way through him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“He’s like an annoying ringing in your ears that never goes away, or a shadow you can always just barely see out of the corner of your eye. I can forget about him for a while, but he always comes back. Maybe you’ll have better luck, Jake.”

Jake said nothing. Not much you could say to that.

“Anyway,” Chris went on. “I hope you will at any rate. It’s your problem now.”

“Sure,” Jake said. “Thanks. I’ll just go to Antarctica and ask around until I find this place. I don’t even know how you get to Antarctica. Do I have to take a cruise or something?”

Chris wasn’t listening. He’d hung up already. Jake kind of wished he’d held back on the smartass comments for a couple minutes, at least until he’d asked Chris how he’d come across a piece of intel like that.

It didn’t really matter, though. Jake already knew what he was going to do.

The next morning, bright and early, he called up Leon, who took the news pretty well. Not even their final destination seemed to surprise him. Hell, he probably knew the place already.

“What makes someone want to build a base in the middle of Antarctica anyway?” Jake said.

“Hubris, I suppose,” Leon replied.

“Is that like having more damn money than sense?”

“Yeah, something like that,” Leon said. “Listen, I’m going to have to pull some strings…”

“Seems like you’ve been tugging a lot of those recently. Just how many do you have left?”

“A few yet,” Leon said. “Can you be ready to move out in the next couple of days?”

“I can be ready in the next couple of hours, if you can.”

Leon laughed. “I can’t. Lately I need at least three fingers of whiskey before I can kill a man, and three days of stretching before I can tackle a mission like this.”

“I wasn’t thinking it was going to get that serious.”

“I wouldn’t discount the possibility, honestly. You still want to do this?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jake said.

“Make sure. That’s the other reason we’re going to wait a few days. I’ll be in touch.”

Even though he knew Leon had been trying to warn him, Jake still felt pretty good after he hung up the phone. But the longer he thought about it, the less exciting the whole thing seemed. Leon seemed pretty sure they were they were going to see some fighting. Jake was inclined to trust his judgment, but he couldn’t imagine Umbrella or anyone else mobilizing a huge force just to guard a few charred remains, regardless of who they had once been.

It might just be a skeleton crew out there on the ice in the middle of nowhere, but it was going to be made up of real flesh and blood people. Not BOWs or Plagas or anything else. Jake had certainly killed people before. He had done it easily enough, but he had never taken it lightly.

He wasn’t completely convinced that Wesker was worth it now.

Leon had been pretty cavalier about the whole thing, though, which had kind of surprised Jake. He was a tough old campaigner, but he’d never struck Jake as the type to kill without conscience. Leon had been in the thick of it for so long, he probably had all kinds of rationalizations in place, things he told himself that made it all right, or at least morally defensible, when he pulled the trigger.

Jake had never had the luxury of being able to build up a thick armor like that. He just pointed a gun where the folks in the know told him to and left the rest up to luck.

That was how he knew, even now, even before they could be fully realized, that all his misgivings weren’t going to amount to shit in the end. He’d been waiting all along for someone to tell him to jump, just so he could ask how high. He didn’t need any high-minded ideals or equivocations or ethical compromises to do the things he did.

***

Leon left him alone for a few days, but it didn’t feel like that long. It was as if just knowing that he had something definite to do was the same as actually doing it. Jake made good use of his sessions at the gym, brushed up on his Russian, which was so rusty it creaked and stuck every few words, and slept like a baby, though he always kept his phone on in case Sherry called.

When Leon finally showed up again, he was weighed down with bags from a camping store, which were stuffed with parkas, long underwear, boots, snow goggles. It must have cost him a fortune, but when Jake asked what he owed Leon wouldn’t say.

Jake wasn’t sure if he was being gallant, or if all of Jake’s harping on his inheritance had given Leon the impression that the money situation was worse than it actually was. The first alternative was merely embarrassing, but the second was outright humiliating for someone with the complexes about money that Jake had.  All the same, he did his best to keep his mouth shut as he tried on the cold-weather gear.

The parka was traffic-cone orange, but it fit him like a pillowy second skin, and Jake could tell that it was built for the bitterest of cold.

“I got us a ride in,” Leon said. “The season is pretty much over down there, but I found a couple who let me charter a flight.”

He rattled all this off casually, as if it hadn’t given him any more trouble than calling around for a rental car. Then he went on, “They can only give us eight hours on the ground, since they want to sneak in between storms. The base is supposed to be abandoned, but I still didn’t think it was a good idea to land on-site. That puts the closest level ground where they can touch down about six miles out. Six miles in and six miles back on foot. Doesn’t give us a lot of time to look around, does it?”

Jake frowned. “You didn’t have to do all this on your own.”

“I know, but it looks less suspicious when there’s only one person sniffing around where he isn’t supposed to.”

“Not that it doesn’t look plenty suspicious,” Jake said pointedly.

“Not that it doesn’t.”

“Fine, so you’re saying we can expect about two hours to look around this compound.”

“Conservatively,” Leon said.

“Yeah, conservatively.”

“I figure we can at least get an idea of the layout of the place,” Leon said. “Use it to plan a second expedition for spring.”

“Look,” Jake said, “I feel like I should tell you, this might not even come to anything. I know you’ve spent a lot already, and I might not get the cash to pay you back. I know better than to get my hopes up when it comes to my father.”

“It’s fine,” Leon said with a casual tone that made Jake’s stomach twist itself into knots. For the first time, he felt a stab of dislike for the older man.

Leon must have seen as much on his face, because he said, “I have investments. A nice little nest egg put away that I’m fully aware I’ll probably never get old enough to spend. At least this way someone gets some real, meaningful use out of it.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “If you have to. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s still just a temporary loan.”


	11. Chapter 11

By the time Sherry made it to the Moscow airport, she had been travelling for nearly 72 hours straight. She’d caught connecting flights on three continents, an itinerary laid out for her by her mysterious connection, presumably to shake anyone who might be tailing her.

In Seoul-Incheon, some actors in Korean period clothing had been walking around. Sherry joined a bunch of other tourists and got her picture taken with them.  All she could think about was how much Jake would have loved it; he got a real kick out of stuff like that. But Jake would have to wait to see it.

She wondered, not for the first time, if Jake was even going to want to speak to her after this. He certainly had a right to be angry, but, try as she might, Sherry couldn’t work up any real concern at the prospect. Jake had been sullen around her before, and cranky. She had certainly seen him lose his temper, but he had never been really furious with her before, and she could not imagine that he ever would be.

All of that might just be her sunny optimism talking, or jetlagged fuzzy thinking for that matter, but Sherry couldn’t waste a lot of time preoccupied with Jake right now. She had a job to do.

In the pocket of her blazer was a key she’d been carrying with her since DC. She found the bank of airport lockers it belonged to and opened one of the doors. There was a single white envelope inside. Sherry tore it open and shook out the piece of paper, but the words typed on it blurred and swam before her eyes.

Sherry pressed her temples hard with her fingertips, and when she looked again she could finally make some sense out of the note. It gave her the coordinates of a private airfield outside the city, and the number of a private plane that would be taking off from there in three hours.

She’d been planning to check into a hotel and get a few hours of real sleep before moving on, but when it started to look like that wasn’t going to be possible Sherry didn’t curse under her breath, or even pause to feel frustrated. She walked out to the curb and hailed a cab to take her out to the airstrip. It was a long drive, and she dozed a little in the backseat, but she kept jolting awake every time they went over a pothole.

There were about a million potholes on the way.

The airstrip was just a couple of metal hangers, glittering coldly in the winter sun, bright and colorless and seeming to evince no heat at all. A woman in a red pea coat and a pair of black woolen leggings was waiting out front of one of the maintenance bays. Sherry made an effort to pat her hair back into place and smooth some of the wrinkles out of her clothing before she approached. This woman was her employer of sorts, and this was something like a job interview.

The woman came forward to meet her. She was no longer blond as she had been when Sherry had first met her, but the way she held herself was unmistakable. She was wearing stilettos, Sherry noticed, though she looked like she was as comfortable in them as Sherry was in her old hiking boots.

Sherry could be sure it was the same woman who had approached in the park because there couldn’t have been more than a handful like her on earth. Sherry lifted an arm to wave as she came close, but then a gust of wind lifted the woman’s hair away from her face and Sherry froze. One hand was still at the level of her shoulder, frozen in an unconvincing salute, while the other slid into the lip of her shoulderbag, brushing against the switchblade hidden in it.

The woman’s smooth brow furrowed momentarily in confusion. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Carla Redames” Sherry managed to gasp, jerking the knife free. “I’m taking you into custody.”

Briefly, the lines on the woman’s forehead deepened, and then they disappeared completely. She laughed a little, huskily. “I’ve been trying to run damage control, but I suppose that’s going to be haunting me for a while still. I know how it looks, but Carla and I are nothing alike.”

She held out a gloved hand. “Ada Wong.”

“Oh…” Sherry felt herself blushing, and she shoved the knife back into her bag, out of sight, before taking Ada’s hand. “Of course you are.”

“I don’t recall us having met formally before.”

“I’ve heard your name around,” Sherry said.

“From Leon?”

The question took Sherry off-guard, and she couldn’t hide the slight frown that tugged at her lips. “No. I don’t think so.”

“That’s a shame,” Ada said briskly, but if she was disappointed by the news, she didn’t show it in the slightest. “Come inside, out of the cold. It’s time you met your partner.”

“Wait…” Sherry said, but Ada had already turned to go into the hanger, moving briskly and efficiently, even in those improbable heels. She got such a lead on her that Sherry had to jog a few steps to catch up. “Why do I need a partner? You haven’t even told me why you called me out here.”

“Yes,” Ada said. “I know. But we had to make sure you were serious about this first.”

She went through the open door in the side of the maintenance shed. It was dark inside and it took Sherry’s eyes a long time to adjust. She was still seeing little more than shapes when Ada launched into an introduction.

“Sherry Birkin, meet Manuela Hidalgo. Manuela and I have been working on this project for about six months now. It was her idea to invite you in.”

Sherry finally managed to blink back some of the shadows and get a good look at the young woman next to Ada. She was a few years older than Sherry, though not a hardened veteran or anything.  She looked nice enough, if not a little aloof. The kind of person who made bad first impressions.

“Me?” Sherry said. “Why?”

She was looking at Manuela when she said it, but she didn’t make a move to answer. After a couple seconds of awkward silence, Ada picked up the slack. “You two have a lot in common, and I think you’ll find a lot to talk about. At least the trip out there won’t be boring.”

Sherry’s first impulse was to be pleased. No matter how strange the context, it was nice to be told that people had been saying good things about her. However, her second impulse, an overwhelming one, was to be suspicious.

“I didn’t come along to take the place of an in-flight movie,” she said.

Ada smiled indulgently, the kind of smile that might have been reserved for baby’s first word if she were more inclined towards motherhood. “We were also very impressed with your track record at the NSA.”

“I also didn’t come along so you could have the NSA’s rubber stamp on your operation here.”

This time, Ada laughed in genuine and pleasant surprise. “You’ve got answers for everything today, don’t you?”

“Our intelligence tells us that Umbrella used to have an engineering lab in Chita, past the end of the commercial rail line.” Manuela spoke for the first time. Though her tone was clipped and professional, there was a hint of something childlike in her voice, as if she were much younger than her looks might suggest.

“We have reason to believe that it was one of the bases of operation for their old satellite network. One of the few, if not the only one, to escape repurposing in the company’s last days. I know gaining the satellite system has been one of your primary projects with the NSA. Would you be more comfortable if I pretended ignorance?”

“No…” Sherry said quietly. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Manuela and I both have our own reasons for wanting to get a peek at the data that might be stored on that network,” Ada said. “But we’re operating as free agents. No offence, but we both have our reasons for not wanting to trust the NSA, or any other acronym for that matter.”

“I understand,” Sherry said. And then, “Okay. I’m in.”

She felt like Manuela was looking at her strangely, though she couldn’t figure out exactly what had changed about her smooth, impassive, doll-like face. Sherry thrust out a hand towards her to seal the deal.

Manuela gave her the tips of her fingers. She was wearing a black leather glove on her right hand, but she had taken its pair off her left and thrust it into her pocket.

“Are we like Charlie’s Angels now?” Sherry asked.

“Not quite,” Ada said. “I won’t be joining you save as support.”

Sherry couldn’t keep her lips from tightening into a disapproving line. It was a subtle shift in her expression, but Ada picked up on it.

“Don’t give me that look,” she laughed. “I’ve done my time in the field. One of the perks of getting to be my age is that you don’t have to jet off to Siberia at a moment’s notice. Besides, I have some things to tend to back in the civilized world.”

“We’ll be fine on our own,” Manuela said shortly.

“Of course you will be.”

Manuela touched Sherry’s arm with her gloved hand. Sherry couldn’t say for sure if it was intentional or not, but she only got the sleeve of her coat, missing the skin underneath entirely.

“Let’s get moving,” she said.

Sherry glanced once more at Ada, who was watching them closely but not making any move to offer assistance. If she was going to get ordered around, she would much rather it have come from the older woman, but Ada didn’t seem like she was going to go along with it any time soon.

Manuela took her out the back of the hangar. There was a single-engine plane sitting on the frosty runway. The pilot, gruff and taciturn and bundled-up, was hosing down the wings with a de-icing compound.

He glanced at them when they came out. “ _Pyatnadtsat minut_ ,” he said. Fifteen minutes.

They stood around on the ice for what felt to Sherry like a lot longer than that, watching him work, steady and unhurried.

Eventually, Sherry said, “So, how did you get into this line of work?”

“The usual way, I suppose,” Manuela replied. “I was scouted young by several agencies, but only three approached me directly. I could already speak some English, so I accepted the Americans’ offer. At the time, I was only fifteen so they wouldn’t put me on field work, but they enrolled me in one of their accelerated programs for future agents.”

“I don’t think that’s the usual way,” Sherry said.

“No?” Manuela said. She seemed genuinely, albeit only mildly, surprised.

“I think it usually involves more college internships and having well-connected parents.”

“Then perhaps my case is exceptional,” Manuela said.

“Yeah, I’d say so. You must be—“ Sherry hesitated. “Sorry. I don’t mean to pry.”

“It’s all right,” Manuela said. “I was infected with T-Veronica when I was eight years old. I’m an asymptomatic carrier. I don’t mind talking about it. I don’t think there should be a stigma surrounding such things.”

“No, there shouldn’t,” Sherry said, but she didn’t volunteer anything more, and she didn’t intend to. Manuela may have been some kind of new, enlightened, self-actualized T-virus survivor, but that didn’t mean Sherry was about to let herself be guilt-tripped into airing all her dirty laundry.

She glanced towards the hangar, but Ada was gone, leaving behind nothing but a smattering of high-heeled tracks in the snow. When she looked back, the pilot was beckoning them over. It wasn’t exactly too late to turn back, but it was too late to spend a lot of time worrying about whether she should turn back.

Sherry hefted her bag onto her shoulder. Manuela was already ahead of her, moving quickly, decisively, but without hurrying, to climb on board the plane. Sherry followed her. It was warm in the cabin, almost stifling. Sherry shifted in her seat, slipping out of her winter clothes, while the pilot ran the pre-flight diagnostics.

He didn’t give them any warning; he didn’t say a single word. The plane pulled away from the hangar and taxied down the empty runway. It took flight swiftly, smoothly, silently without a single jolt or whisper.


	12. Chapter 12

They passed the Umbrella base on the way to the landing site, so at least there were no surprises there. At Leon’s urging, the pilot took them down a little, but they were still too high up to make out any of the details. Jake got the impression that there wasn’t much to see anyway.

The base amounted to just three buildings, all of them pretty small and none particularly well maintained. A field of solar panels stared out from the roof of the largest one, looking murky and cataracted beneath the flat Arctic sun.

Jake thought it made for a pretty eerie scene. He looked around at Leon for confirmation that it was fucking spooky down there, but Leon wasn’t even paying attention. He was up in the jump seat behind the navigator, his head twisted around awkwardly so he could talk to the pilots.

The plane belonged to a Russian couple, Irina and Tanya. According to Leon, they were the only ones willing to make the flight this late in the year, at least without asking a lot of questions Jake didn’t particularly want to answer.

At first, he had thought it seemed like a pretty shady set-up, but Jake soon discovered that the women were professionals. They didn’t make any uncomfortable inquiries, or any inquiries at all that weren’t related to payment and the timely delivery of it. They had the discretion of career mercenaries, but Jake had the feeling that it came less from a sense of honor towards two people they must have instantly perceived as being in the same line of work and more because they didn’t really give a shit what anyone’s business in Antarctica was.

They must have seen the old Umbrella base before, and indeed they even seemed to be navigating by it, but they didn’t express any interest in ever finding out what it was doing down there.

Jake liked that about them. He hoped they lasted a long time out here, or somewhere else not too different, beyond the reach of convention.

Irina brought them down on a glacier, and Tanya lowered a set of stairs out of the door, the bottom three steps disappearing into the drifted snow.

“We’ll wait,” she said. Her English was spoken with a hint of a British accent rather than a Slavic one. “There’s no need to rush. But don’t be late, either.”

Not for the first time, Jake had the feeling that this wasn’t the brightest idea he’d ever had. Even Leon wasn’t doing much to assure him, not with the hood of his neon orange parka cinched around his face and a pair of pink goggles strapped over his eyes. While Jake looked on, he climbed down out of the plane and sunk in to the snow up to his knees.

“Shit,” Leon said.

“Forget something?” Tanya came out of the back of the plane carrying two sets of snowshoes. “We’ll add the rental fee to your final bill,” she said, and thrust a pair into Jake’s arms with barely suppressed irritation.

“Thanks,” Jake said, embarrassed.

“Go out now,” Tanya said. “You’re letting the cold air in.”

Jake jumped down. The frozen crust on top of the snow cracked when he landed on it, and the sound was like a squeaky cough. This wasn’t the nice fluffy Winter Wonderland snow that Jake remembered from his childhood. It wasn’t even the gray slushy snow of DC. It was dry and hard, giving only with reluctance when Jake tried to pull his boots free. The sun, too, was like no sun he’d ever seen before. It hung high and bright in a blue, cloudless sky, but it might as well have been painted there for all the warmth it gave off. Though it shown with an incandescent whiteness, it evinced no heat at all.

Leon hopped over to where Jake was standing, pulling one of the snowshoes on as he went. “Never thought I’d visit a place like this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jake said.

“It’s beautiful.” Leon grinned. Jake could tell by the way the muffler around his mouth bunched up.

He didn’t bother to answer. Stepping down hard on one of the plane’s pontoons, he finished hauling himself out of the snow so he could strap the snowshoes on.

When he finished, Leon was already moving. Jake hurried to catch up with him, and when he did Leon said, “Can you believe this fresh air? Imagine what the stars must look like out here.”

After that, Jake hung back a little. Leon was the navigator anyway. He had a little travel GPS, but he used a compass mostly. Jake thought he seemed to be getting a kick out of it. Probably not much call for Boy Scout shit like that anymore, not even in Leon’s line of work.

Finding the Umbrella base was up to him, but getting back wasn’t going to be a problem as far as Jake could tell. When he looked back the way he had come, he saw two pairs of footprints, stretching back as far as the eye could see, like tracks on the lunar surface. The wind was blowing pretty hard, but not enough to disturb the hard-packed snow. Occasionally it threw up a cloud of tiny ice crystals into the air, scattering them around like glitter, but that was about the extent of what it could do.

He wasn’t sure how long they walked. The sun didn’t seem to move in the sky, and the landscape changed so little that they might have traveled a thousand miles or ten feet. Eventually, they came to the top of a high drift and the Umbrella base lay in the valley below them like a crouching black spider on a white web.

Leon stopped and Jake came up next to him. Even from all the way up here, it was easy to see that the base had been maintained. The runway was clear and there was paths shoveled in the snow.

“Looks like somebody’s home,” Leon said. “They left the porch light on for us.”

“What should we do?”

“Honestly, we should probably head back to the plane,” Leon said. “We should forget we were ever here.”

“Yeah,” Jake replied. He felt some big, bitter emotion welling up inside, but he wasn’t completely convinced that it was disappointment.

Leon shrugged. “On the other hand, they must know that we’re here by now and no one’s shot at us yet. Maybe we should just go knock on the front door.”

“Sure,” Jake said.

Leon unslung his backpack and crouched down. He rummaged inside for a second, and when he straightened up again he was holding a pair of pistols. The big padded gloves they were both wearing made their hands too awkward to shoot anything accurately, but maybe Leon had brought the guns more for reassurance, or because it had felt like something he ought to do.

He passed the larger of the two over to Jake. The metal was so cold it burned his skin through his gloves.

“Don’t go crazy with that thing,” Leon said.

They hiked down the side of the drift. All was still in the valley below them, and all quiet except for the bellowing of Jake’s breath inside his muffler and the crunch of their shoes as they broke through the ice with each step. The largest building in the compound seemed better maintained than the others. Though the snow was piled up high on the windward side, it was mostly cleared from around the door.

No one came out to stop them; nothing moved within or without.

Leon cracked the hatch on the exterior of the base, a cloud billowed out and engulfed them. It was a lot warmer inside, and when Jake stepped through the door his goggles fogged up instantly. The heat was on, and when Jake peeled off his frozen muffler the difference in temperature made his skin sting.

He glanced at Leon. They were thinking the same thing.

Jake’s long dormant killer instincts had kicked in so smoothly and subtly that he almost hadn’t noticed they were back. He knew they were not being watched. There was no one else here, alive, dead, or otherwise.

Leon glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a couple of hours to kill,” he said. “Let’s take a look around.”

They got the lay of the land pretty quick. The base was hardly sprawling, and far from crammed with secrets. One wing housed the barracks and some single rooms. Most of the beds were stripped down to the springs, but some of them were made up. Blankets and pillows had been left behind, but no personal effects. In the kitchen, clean dishes had been left on the drying rack, but everything else had been neatly put away. They’d had a skeleton crew here until recently. They were gone now, but they hadn’t left in a hurry.

“Did they take off because of us?” Jake said, feeling like it was a stupid question with an obvious answer, but not sure if it was obvious because it was yes, or because it was no.

Leon shrugged. “Chris said this was the place.”

In the other wing of the compound, there was a small observatory, as well as a disused sample room with the cabinets cleaned out and the empty spots in them still neatly labeled. It was pretty innocuous stuff, a nice little Potemkin village the Umbrella people had set up for the sake of appearances. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust, and a lot of it looked like it had long since succumbed to the cold.

Only one door at the end of the hall seemed new. It was sealed with a keypad lock, but a new strip of duct tape had been pasted on the wall above it, the code printed on it in neat block capitals. It was the kind of set up that normally would have sent Jake high-tailing it in the opposite direction even under the most auspicious of circumstances, but this time he stayed where he was.

Leon was watching him, but he made no move to interfere. This was Jake’s show, as far as he was concerned.

Jake had been in charge of men’s lives before, and he always made it a rule to play things conservatively. He didn’t want to get anyone killed. They were just mercenaries; they punched the clock, they got paid, and no one was in any hurry to stick his neck out.

This time it was different, though. They were further off the grid than Jake had ever been, but he wasn’t scared. Neither was Leon, if the way he held himself, without a single bead of sweat on his rugged brow or a single furrow on his handsome, impassive face was any indication. Though maybe Leon had long ago forgotten how to be afraid of death, or at least learned to lock it away until late at night, when no one could see him paralyzed into wakefulness, buried in a bottle, where those old terrors could not impose on anyone else.

The question this time was not whether finding out what was behind that door was worth the risk, but whether or not Jake really wanted to find out. Whether or not he really had the balls to see it through to the end. It had never been like that before, a matter of want instead of need.

In a sudden fit of anger, Jake stabbed in the code on the keypad. The door unlatched and slid back.

Too late now, Jake thought vindictively. His blood was hot with a familiar rage, one that had been cooled by all those months of domesticity. He had almost forgotten how it felt, like a fire that never went out.

The door opened into a flight of stairs that descended past the foundation of the base, into a network of subterranean hallways beneath the permafrost. In a couple of places, the steel paneling on the walls had buckled beneath the relentless expansion of the icy soil.

Down here, too, all was quiet. Jake checked one of the rooms at random. It was cramped with a couple of steel tables, the walls lined with shelves cluttered with scientific glassware, computer equipment, boxes of old files. A film of hoarfrost covered everything like mold. It was significantly colder down here under the surface, a fact which Jake only realized when he moved to zip up his parka and found his fingers stiff and numb.

He tried another door, and found another disused lab. This one was almost completely empty, but back in one corner was a large tank full of murky formaldehyde. Floating in the cloudy amber was a Tyrant BOA. It was missing its right arm and its left leg, the wounds trailing wisps of tissue that looked translucent in the liquid. Its eyes were milky white in death.

Jake tapped on the glass with his finger. Behind him, he heard Leon shift on his feet and take in a sharp breath that wasn’t quite a gasp. “Careful with that thing,” he said.

At the sound of his voice, Jake turned around and looked at him as if realizing for the first time that he wasn’t alone here. “Everyone’s gone,” he said. “My dad must be gone by now too.”

“Let’s keep looking,” Leon said. “We still have a little time before we have to head back. Chris said--”

“Chris doesn’t know shit,” Jake snapped, his voice louder than he had thought it would be, loud enough to startle him. “I mean, he seriously doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Leon’s brows contracted in sympathy. “He knows a few things.”

“Fine,” Jake said. “Let’s keep looking. See if I care.”

“Just one more place,” Leon said. “There’s a room down here I want to check out.”

Jake followed him. Leon glanced back once or twice to make sure he was there. He seemed pretty grateful for the company, and not a little worried that it might be abruptly withdrawn. The room he was talking about was at the end of the hall. A row of transparent plastic panels provided a glimpse into a surveillance room, banked with monitors. There was an interior door, and beside that a pane of one-way glass. The light hit it all wrong, and it was impossible to make out much of the room beyond, just a single hunched form, crowded with shadows.

Leon opened the door to the surveillance room, and Jake noticed that his hand had slipped down to his hip where his pistol rested and he had thumbed open the clasp holding the hood guard closed. Jake didn’t think he even knew that he had done it.

Once inside, a quiet humming broke the silence. One of the computers had been left on. Jake jiggled the mouses next to the monitors lined up on the desk and eventually one glowed to life. It went right to the desktop, without prompting for a password. Jake figured that whoever had been here until recently had counted on the isolation to protect their data.

The desktop was taken up by a row of folders, labeled Phase 1 through Phase 14. Jake clicked on Phase 4, and it opened a series of x-ray images. He checked a few of them at random. They all showed a right femur, broken cleanly in the first image and progressing through the stages of healing in the ones that followed. Jake had thought that the numbers assigned to each image were dates, but now he wasn’t so sure. If they were, than it had taken the break only a week and a half to knit back together. In a follow-up x-ray taken two weeks later, there was not even any scoring on the bone to indicate there had once been an injury.

Jake’s stomach flopped over. He felt like he was going to puke, but he opened another folder.

Phase 7 contained x-rays of a broken hand, the fingers shattered into slivers of bone. That one had taken three weeks to heal. In Phase 9, a collapsed lung, shriveled and choked with fluid in the first image, whole and healthy in the last, taken nine days later.

The folder labeled Phase 13 was a little different. It was full of photographs rather than x-ray images. Jake couldn’t tell from the thumbnails what he was looking at, so he clicked the first picture to expand it. It was a shot of a man’s abdomen, hips to ribcage. The soft part beneath his navel had been carved open in a surgical smile, a piece of plastic kitchen wrap stretched over it to keep the bulging intestines from spilling out.

Jake jerked back. He felt his stomach clench and tasted bile in the back of his mouth but he managed to keep his lunch down.

“Leon…” he rasped, but Leon wasn’t there. He had gone ahead, through the door into the interior laboratory. Jake closed the photo on the screen and went after him, trying to tell himself that he wasn’t hurrying.

The room was empty except for a steel table, the kind with gutters, used for autopsies. A white sheet had been pulled over the table, and beneath it the contours of a still form could be made out. The sheet was covered in streaks the color of rust, and in the center was a circle of bright red, still damp and shiny under the fluorescent lights.

The floor felt uneven under Jake’s feet. He looked down. The tiles were all slanted inward, culminating in a large drain in the center of the floor. A ribbon of red swirled around the mouth of the drain, not enough to run down.

Leon had his gun out. He held it at his shoulder, almost like an extension of his arm. Jake kept his holstered. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t jumpy at all, and he would have felt like a fool if he drew now.

With an untrembling hand, Leon reached out and took hold of the soiled sheet. He pulled it down, past an overlong and matted mane of golden hair; a high and regal brow, now furrowed with deep lines; eyes the color of twin bruises, open and unseeing, the sclera shot through with red.

That was all Jake needed to see to recognize his father, and more than enough to know that the man was dead.

“Jesus…” he muttered. He wanted to turn away, but for some reason he didn’t.

Leon pulled the sheet down further, uncovering Wesker’s upper body. There was a fresh bullet hole in his chest, but it hadn’t bled much. It had probably been put there after he was dead, insurance that he would stay that way. Leon must have noticed the same thing, because his attention went to the IV line in the bend of Wesker’s elbow. The skin all around the insertion point was red and raw, and Jake could see the veins under Wesker’s pale skin, a roadmap of black and purple.

Poison, Jake thought, and then a bullet through the heart to make sure that it stuck. They had done a thorough job, and, whatever else Wesker had been, he was free now. He had longed for immortality, and then he had almost found it. In the basement of an inconsequential laboratory, prodded by needles and tubes. Cut and mauled on a whim, to see how far his body could be pushed before it broke.

Jake let out his breath in a sharp exhalation. He felt like he had been holding it for a long time.

Leon glanced back at him, probably making sure he was okay. Then he lifted one of the lower corners of the sheet, where it was bloodiest, uncovering Wesker’s leg.

A section of skin on his thigh had been peeled away, down to the raw muscle underneath. The wound looked livid, but surgically clean. The neat edges had a knitted look where the skin had started to grow back.

“What were they doing here?” Leon said. He sounded weird, Jake thought. In fact, he sounded fucking pissed.

“They were interested in the Uroborous virus,” Jake replied. Leon hadn’t seen the photos, and maybe that was just as well. Wesker was dead now, but he’d been alive when they’d done that to him. “They were interested in how fast he healed.”

Leon squeezed his eyes shut momentarily. He shoved his pistol back in the holster as if he were disappointed that he had come too late to use it on someone. “All right,” he said, passing a hand back through his hair. “We’ll take the body with us. The BSAA is going to want it, but we’ll get a death certificate out of it at least. You’ll get what you came for.”

He pulled the sheet back down over Wesker’s ruined leg, tucking the corner under in preparation to wrap up the body.

“You have everything handled?” Jake asked, hanging back.

“Do I have everything with _your father_ handled?” Leon said. “Yeah, I pretty much got it.”

Jake shrunk back. Leon had never spoken to him like that before, not even when Jake knew, on reflection, he’d been acting like a pretty insufferable little shit.

Leon pulled off one of his gloves with his teeth and started to fumble with the IV embedded in Wesker’s elbow. It was taped in there pretty good, but eventually Leon got it loose and he pulled the needle free. A little bubble of blackish blood formed at the site of the puncture. Leon was working fast now, unhesitant and unblinking in the face of death. He unbuckled the shackles on Wesker’s wrists and tucked his arms in close to his body. Then he leaned over him to pull the sheet up.

That was where he hesitated.

“Did you hear that?” he whispered.

“I didn’t hear anything,” Jake said. But then he did.

A wet rattle came from somewhere deep in Wesker’s body, the sound of old technology stirring reluctantly to life. The corpse moved; its ribs ballooned outward and its throat hitched a few times in rapid succession.

It took Jake a second to realize that it was struggling to breathe.

Jake took a slow step back. He kept his eyes on Leon the whole time, so he knew that he didn’t move away at all. Instead, he reached out, very slowly, and touched Wesker’s lank hair with his fingers.

The corpse’s eyes rolled to the whites. Its blue lips peeled back. It made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a cough, and then it was gasping and coughing. Neat nails scrabbled along the edge of the table, looking for something to hold on to.

Wesker lurched over on his side and vomited a torrent of black clots onto the tile floor. A gout of blood leapt from the gunshot wound in his chest.

“Shit!” Jake heard himself say, and he fumbled for the gun at his hip. His hands were shaking, all the blood rapidly retreating to his heart. He lost his hold. The pistol fell to the floor and went off, but Jake barely heard it over the howling in his head.

The bullet went wild, punching a hole in the far wall.

“Goddamnit!” Leon shouted. “Go wait outside!”

Jake didn’t have to be told twice. He stumbled back, and flung the door back into the surveillance room open so hard he almost knocked if off its hinges. The last thing he wanted to do was look over his shoulder, but at the last second he did.

Leon was bent over the autopsy table, bent over the body that was no longer a corpse. Wesker’s hands were knotted in the front of Leon’s coat. His fingers pallid, brittle, but not without strength.


	13. Chapter 13

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay,” Leon said.

He didn’t think the mantra itself did much to calm him, but by the time it was out he had settled down a little all the same. When Wesker had lunged up off the table, Leon’s heart had dropped into his boots. He’d seen it more times than he could have counted even if he’d wanted to: a corpse once and now corpse no longer, lurching upright and making an off-kilter grab for him. He’d thought that he had learned better by now, but no such luck. When Wesker had moved, Leon had not.

Though he seemed to be all right, Leon did not chalk his inaction up to having done the right thing. He’d hesitated, and luck alone had saved him again. Chris never would have made a mistake like that.

It seemed a pretty safe bet that nothing like this would have ever happened to Chris.

Wesker’s hands were clenched in the front of Leon’s parka, and his head was inclined so that his brow just brushed Leon’s breastbone.  Leon’s hands rested on his shoulders, neither pulling him closer nor pushing him away, but steadying him certainly. The muscles that corded Wesker’s back and arms were still hard and chiseled, but there seemed to be no strength in them. He trembled all over with the effort of keeping himself upright.

His heart was pounding. One of their hearts was, at least.

Leon shifted his grip and tried to ease Wesker back a little. He didn’t seem to be going for it, though. His breath hitched and quickened. Leon could feel it against his ribs; it seemed abnormally warm.

“All right, then,” Leon sighed. He figured Wesker would be more comfortable if he could follow what he was doing, so Leon moved slowly. He ran one hand along the back of Wesker’s shoulder. The muscles there were compacted into knots so hard that the seemed not to yield at all beneath Leon’s fingers. He went on, cupping the back of Wesker’s neck in his palm, using his thumb to trace the parabola at the base of his skull.

“You’re safe now,” he said. He spoke quietly, evenly, careful to let neither pity nor exasperation enter into it. He’d been here in the past, and he knew the score. “Those people who hurt you are gone, and you’re safe. But you have to let go. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to take a look at you.”

Wesker shifted under his hands, lifting his head, though not enough to look Leon in the eye. All at once, he jerked away, but without Leon to support him he seemed to lose all strength and sank back.

“It's you," he said.

“Yeah,” Leon said. “It’s me.”

He wiped his palms on his coat. His hands were trembling suddenly. As he watched, a peculiar look came over Wesker’s face. He lifted a hand to his chest, moving slowly, stiffly, as if unsure of his body. It was odd and affecting to see him like that. By all outward appearances, he was still the same nightmare god cast in bronze. The muscles in his uncovered chest and arms flexed and rippled with every movement, but there seemed to be no force behind them.

It all began to come together in Leon’s mind. Wesker’s strength had been eaten away from within, but somehow Uroborous had kept the damage from showing in his outward appearance. He had been maintained in form but not function, a vessel for the virus, too valuable to lose.

Leon felt his stomach twist itself into knots.  Wesker’s fingertips had found the ragged edge of the bullet hole in his chest. The wound bled in a trickle, slow but steady. Wesker traced the torn edge. One of his fingers slipped inside, and the wound puckered around it.

He made a face, and pulled his hand back.

“Take it easy,” Leon said. He made a half-serious attempt to reach for Wesker, but when Wesker didn’t pull away as he had expected he felt he had to follow through with it. He settled for closing both of his clammy, suddenly clumsy hands around one of Wesker’s sculpted and powerful ones and easing it away from his chest.

Wesker sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. “That hurts.”

“Sorry,” Leon said. He unslung his pack. “I brought a first aid kit. There’s some morphine—“

“No!” Wesker rasped. There was still steel in his voice, though badly corroded now. “No more drugs.”

“—or aspirin,” Leon continued easily. “If that’s better.”

He kept one eye on Wesker as he fished out the first aid kit, so he knew that Wesker never once took his eyes off him. Leon tried to imagine what he would be feeling were their positions reversed, and he came up utterly lacking. Whatever horrors Wesker had seen, whatever pain he had endured, they seemed to have left practically no mark on him at all.

For all Chris had confided in him about this monster of a man, Leon had desperately, furtively wanted to believe that he was exaggerating. For if a person really could excise everything that had made them a human being at all, then what hope was there for any of them caught up in the horrific fallout of Raccoon City?

Wesker had killed a lot of people, but Leon had too.  The differences between them were semantic at best. Leon had always known that, and he reminded himself of it again as he straightened up and placed a couple of tablets in Wesker’s palm. His hand trembled, but he managed to get them in his mouth.

Leon moved to hand him a bottle of water, then thought better of it. Screwing up his courage, he slipped one arm behind Wesker’s shoulders and lifted his head. With the other, he brought the bottle to his mouth.

Wesker drank for a long time. When he was finished, he leaned back, resting his head on Leon’s shoulder. Leon held him like that. It seemed like they could both use the support at the moment.

“Don’t worry,” Leon sighed, as if resigning himself. “I’ll get you out of here.”

Wesker looked up at him. His expression was inscrutable but steady.

“Don’t make me regret it,” Leon continued. He was doing his best to sound stern, but in fact he was terrified. He knew what Wesker was, better than most people, and yet he still felt that he must do this, make the call that might ultimately release this plague upon the world once more. But he was worried that his judgment was clouded for that very reason. He had been too close to this for too long and could no longer be objective.

In the absence of a reply from Wesker, Leon went on.  “Wait here. I need to go talk to someone.”

He thought he noticed subtle lines of tension settle around Wesker’s eyes. 

“It’s not what you think,” Leon said quickly. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but your kid is here. Did you even know you had a kid?”

When Wesker still said nothing, Leon went on. “He’s a good kid, if you care.  He thought you were dead.”

“I was dead,” Wesker said.

“Don’t get cute,” Leon replied. “Just sit there and wait for me to get back."

He felt a distinct sense of dread when he turned his back on Wesker, but it was nothing compared to the sinking in his stomach when he went out in the hallway and found himself facing Jake again. The younger man was sitting with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up. He surged to his feet when Leon came out.

“Listen,” Leon said. “I need a favor. Radio the girls. Tell them to bring the plane around and set down on the landing strip outside.”

Jake looked at him steadily. “Is he…?”

“He’s alive.” Leon sighed. “I’m sorry, Jake. I know this wasn’t what you came here for. We thought he was dead, but he’s alive.” And it was so frequently the other way around, Leon reminded himself. It almost never happened like this.

“Whatever,” Jake said. “I’ll let them know.”

“And see if you can’t find some clothes to fit him,” Leon said. “He’s about your size.”

Jake attempted a derisive scoff but it came out more like a hiss of pain. Leon was sympathetic, but he had to let him go. Wesker was waiting for him and, strange as it was, he needed Leon more right now.

In the surveillance room, Leon paused for a moment, looking in on Wesker through the one-way glass. He hadn’t moved, save to pull the sheet up around himself. When Leon came back into the lab, Wesker started to raise himself on his elbows.

“Don’t,” Leon said, hurrying forward a step. He slipped out of his parka and pulled it around the other man’s shoulder.

Wesker’s brow furrowed. He reached up and touched the collar of the coat with his fingers. “What’s this for?”

“It’s cold in here.”

Wesker lowered his eyes and pulled the parka close.

“Just take it easy,” Leon said. He ran a hand back through his hair. “Jake’ll be back in a minute.”

“I’m fine,” Wesker replied. He sat up slowly, moving with exaggerated care as if wary of running up against an obstacle he could not surmount. Leon watched him, making no move to help but ready to step in if Wesker needed it. He seemed to want to handle things himself, though.

Wesker swung his legs over the edge of the table. He paused there for a moment, catching his breath. A fresh ribbon of blood trickled from the healing hole in his chest and his lips compressed in pain.

Leon sighed. “Don’t do that to yourself.” He touched Wesker’s arm, and Wesker jerked away from him. He pushed himself to his feet, and his legs gave out almost at once. His knees unhinged, and he would have fallen outright if Leon hadn’t stepped forward to catch him. Wesker was almost a full head taller than him, and he looked so solidly-built that Leon wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold him. But Wesker was light, unnaturally so, as if his magnificent musculature were nothing but a paper cast over a hollow core.

Putting one arm around Wesker’s waist and the other on his shoulder, Leon helped him straighten up. Wesker’s legs trembled under him, refusing to take his weight.

“Relax,” Leon said. Wesker’s cheek was against the side of his throat, and Leon could feel how livid his skin was. “Just breathe for a second. Is it your leg?”

Wesker shook his head. “It hurts, but that’s all. The damage is superficial. I can’t…”

“Okay,” Leon said. “I understand.”

He helped Wesker sit back on the edge of the table, and with a conscientious hand he rearranged the sheet around his hips and pulled the parka back up on his shoulders. Wesker didn’t seem to notice if he was wearing it or not, and Leon was beginning to regret surrendering the garment. He felt frozen through.

“How long did they keep you strapped down?” he asked.

Wesker was quiet. Leon was beginning to think that he had no intention of answering, when Wesker finally spoke. “How long has it been?”

“Since when?”

“The fire…” Wesker stopped, correcting himself. “Since the volcano. I remember that.”

Leon sighed. That quiet, grave voice was starting to have an effect on him, as much as he hated to admit it. “It’s been a while,” he replied. “Everything will probably come back once you start moving around again.”

Wesker nodded. He seemed more comfortable now that they were speaking in anatomical practicalities, wounds that could heal and broken bones that could be set. He preferred to think of himself as a medical subject, a specimen, rather than a human being in pain. As if he had never learned any other way, Leon thought, dread ballooning in his stomach.

The door to the lab banged open. Jake stepped inside but didn’t come forward any further. “The plane’s coming. I found some clothes.”

“Can you bring them over here?” Leon said patiently.

“I don’t think so,” Jake replied. He shifted his weight, planting his feet firmly.

Leon glanced up at Wesker’s face. He wasn’t looking at Jake. His eyes were lowered and his lips were set in a bloodless bow. Leon was reluctant to leave him for long. He didn’t want Wesker to get worked up and bite the tile again. But Jake was nothing if not stubborn, and Leon was forced to interrupt his vigil long enough to retrieve the jeans and boots Jake had brought from upstairs. Jake dumped them in Leon’s arms and then turned on his heels.

“You want to stay and give me a hand?” Leon said.

“I’m not going to watch him get dressed,” Jake shot back over his shoulder. His voice sounded shrill, like a band wound too tight, close to snapping entirely. He slammed the door on his way out, and Leon decided to let him go.

He returned to Wesker’s side. His head was down but he had inclined it slightly so he could watch Jake’s departure out of one of the slats in his lank hair. “Is that him?” he asked.

“His name’s Jake,” Leon said. He shook out the clothes. Now that he had something to do with his hands, he felt himself moving with brisk assuredness.

“Does he look like me?”

Leon glanced up. “Some people say so,” he said. At the moment, though, Leon could see little of Jake in Wesker’s sunken cheeks and haunted, shadowy eyes. “He’s pretty young. I can’t imagine you ever being that young.”

“I can’t remember ever being that young,” Wesker said.

Leon glanced over at him. For a second, it had almost sounded like Wesker was trying to joke, or at least act agreeable, but everything he said came out in the same flat, detached voice, from between lips that seemed loath to go through the motions of making words. He was in shock. He might have been numb now, but he was going to be feeling everything soon enough.

“Get dressed, okay?” Leon said. “We have to go.”

Wesker’s hands groped blindly at the table until they found the edge, which he gripped tightly. “Where are you taking me?”

Leon sighed. “Somewhere safe. I promise. Come on.”

It took some prodding, but he finally managed to get Wesker into a pair of jeans and a wool coat better suited for spring than the Arctic winter. Leon slid the boots on himself. They were a little small, but Wesker didn’t complain. Then Leon took hold of his arm and helped him down, but once Wesker was one his feet Leon quickly realized the extent of his muscular atrophy. His legs quaked with each step, and they were not even halfway to the door before a fresh film of blood appeared on the thigh of Wesker’s jeans above the patch of flayed skin.

Wesker’s breath came in short, sharp gasps, and tears of effort had formed in the corners of his eyes. Before he could think better of it, Leon bent and scooped him up into his arms. Wesker made a small, strangled sound when his feet left the floor, halfway between a cry and a moan. His hands tangled in Leon’s collar as if to push him away, but he froze before he did so.

“You’re okay,” Leon said. “We’re going to go outside. There’s a plane waiting. Just let me get you on board, and no one has to touch you again. No one is going to do anything you don’t want them to.”

Wesker didn’t answer. Leon could feel him wound up tight in his arms, kinetic energy that might let go at any moment in a formless fit of panic. Best to get a move on, Leon thought. He started walking again, nudging the door open with his hip and heading out into the hall.

Jake was nowhere to be seen, but maybe that was for the best. Wesker wasn’t doing so hot.

“This reminds me of when I was a kid,” Leon said abruptly. He thought if he could just keep talking it might give Wesker something else to focus on. “When it’s cold like this, I mean. I must have been five or six years old. It’s one of the first things I really remember, actually. It was late spring, probably the end of April. I went to bed one night and it was about 65 degrees out and it was late enough in the year that there was still a little light in the sky. But when I woke up, it was pitch black No light anywhere, not even from the nightlight. Oh, and it was freezing cold.”

He glanced down at Wesker. His head was bent forward so that it was impossible to see his expression, but Leon had the distinct impression that he was listening at least. He found the stairs leading to the upper level of the base and he began to climb them, slowly so he could keep his balance.

“Anyway, I started crying, like kids do. I was honestly convinced that I’d accidentally slept for months, or years. It woke my older brother up, and he was pretty annoyed, until he started getting a little scared, too. Then our parents came in with flashlights. It turned out that in the three or four hours since I’d gone to sleep, there’d been this freak cold snap. The temperature had dropped about 50 degrees, and about a foot of snow had fallen. The power was out, too. My dad took me out to look at it. We lived in the city, but with all the lights out it was so different, like it was peaceful. The cold had come on so fast that the leaves on the trees were encased in frost. We watched the snow falling in the beam of the flashlight, big soft quiet flakes sliding in and out of the light.”

He hit the upper level and managed to toe the door open without pitching the awkward weight in his arms. He could hear the engines of the girls’ GEV, close now and closing.

“The next day, all the roads were closed. My brother couldn’t go to school, and my folks couldn’t get in to work. My mom bundled us up, and we went over to the park and went sledding. The snow was deep, soft powder. I only made it down the hill about one time without getting stuck. It was a really good day.”

They’d made it, he realized. They were closing in on the exterior door.

“Why tell me this?” Wesker said. His temple rested against Leon’s shoulder, and his fingers were twisted loosely in the front of his coat.

“It just sort of popped into my head,” Leon said quietly. “It’s a nice memory.”

“Are those the sorts of things fathers and children do?”

“Sometimes,” Leon said. “Maybe not all that often, but once in a while.”

They came around the corner, into the hallway that housed the base’s exterior hatch. Jake was waiting by the door. When he saw Leon carrying Wesker, his eyebrows first shot up towards his hairline, and then almost immediately contracted into a scowl.

“They just landed,” he snapped. He was staring straight ahead, not even looking Leon in the eye, but rather focused on some spot just beyond his left ear. “We need to go.”

Leon nodded. He could tell Jake was furious, but he supposed he would just have to learn to live with it. They had to bring Wesker with them now and sort the rest out later. There was no alternative that Leon was willing to contemplate.

Jake opened the hatch. Cold air gusted into the hall, coating the floor and walls in snow and frozen vapor. He plunged on ahead, leaving Leon to bring up the rear. By about ten yards out, he was shivering all over, and he could hear Wesker’s teeth chattering in his ear. Leon stumbled through the snow, to the lowered steps of the plane. He laid Wesker down across one of the seats and stood, clenching and unclenching his hands in an attempt to drive some of the feeling back into them.

“You get frostbite within 90 seconds of contact with the air,” Irina said. She came out of the rear of the plane, tossing a blanket over Wesker as she went by him, seemingly unsurprised that two men had gone into that base and three had come out. “It will hurt, but it does not always lead to necrosis. You will probably be fine.”

“I need another favor,” Leon said, following Irina up to the front. She dropped into the navigator’s seat and Tanya started the engines. “I need passage back to America, for myself and that man back there.”

Irina and Tanya exchanged a glance. “We do not do favors,” Tanya said. “We do jobs, when the price is right. I will make inquiries for you and your friend.”

Leon thanked her, but she didn’t seem to do gratitude that well either. As the plane lifted off, Leon sank gratefully into the jump seat, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he realized that Jake was sitting across from him, his hands tight on the arms of his seat, glaring.

“I’m sorry,” Leon sighed.

“I just want to know what the hell you think you’re doing,” Jake said.

“They tortured him…” Leon felt his stomach twisting itself into knots.

“So what?” Jake snapped. “He’s not some innocent victim. He’s not one of those people from Raccoon or Lianshang or anywhere else. I’m sorry about what happened to them, but I’m not sorry about him.”

“Kid, he’s a human being.”

“He’s a monster. Literally. A monster.”

Leon’s eyes narrowed. “There’s still part of him left that isn’t. Look, Jake, I’m not asking for your help on this. You didn’t see what I saw. He can’t go into the BSAA like this. If Chris gets wind of it…”

“ _Chris_?” Jake said incredulously. “You actually have the balls to tell me what I should and shouldn’t say to Chris after he dragged me into this? I’m not saying we need to go to the BSAA. I’m saying we need to kill him ourselves, and make sure it actually sticks for once.”

“No,” Leon said. “We’re not doing that. At least, not yet. I need time to think.”

“He tried to kill us all,” Jake said.

“I know, Jake. I know what he did, maybe even better than you do in some ways. But I’ll take responsibility. I’ll take care of him.”


	14. Chapter 14

The girls got them a private jet back to the States. Wesker slept most of the way, and Jake sulked, which didn’t exactly make for great company.  Leon thought he was okay with that; he could use the time to think.

In fact, he only ended up more confused.

Partway through the second leg of the flight, Tanya reached into her bag, pulled out a bottle of vodka and thrust it at Leon.

“No charge,” she said, giving him a pointed look. “On the house.”

Leon didn’t bother trying to explain, or even bother trying to refuse the bottle. He cracked the seal and took a long drink, longer than even he had expected he would. He hadn’t thought it had been that obvious, but, hell, leave it to a Russian…

The vodka didn’t exactly clear his head, but at least it got him moving. It got him to put in the call he’d been avoiding since they’d lifted off from the base in Antarctica. It shouldn’t have been hard, but it was starting to look like he was developing a nasty habit of treating easy things like they were difficult and impossible things like they were no big deal.

After he hung up, he made his way to the rear of the plane where Jake had retreated to avoid him. Leon offered the bottle, and Jake took a sip. When he handed it back, Leon took a lot more than that.

“Listen, kid. You don’t have to do this. Once we’re on the ground, if you want to take off, I won’t hold it against you.”

Jake was quiet for a long time. Leon was starting to think that he didn’t intend to answer, and he was weighing the benefits of trying again, when Jake’s lips parted a fraction of an inch and he managed to grind out, “You’re going to get in a lot of trouble for this.”

Leon frowned. “Yeah. Probably."

 “And you might make some enemies out of people who used to be your friends.”

“Sure,” Leon said. He took another drink; he was starting to feel pretty good, like he should have after a job well done, but he wasn’t quite all the way there yet. “And I wouldn’t blame them for that. There are a hell of a lot of concerned citizens out there, you know.”

“Jesus, Leon. You’re half in the fucking bag already.”

“Wait,” Leon said. “Hear me out. I know you don’t like thinking about it, but those bugs your old man has inside him are a pretty hot commodity. There are a lot of folks out there who would do a lot of things to get their hands on them, including some friends of mine. So if you want to feel better about all this, just tell yourself I did it because I’d rather have him where I can keep an eye on him.”

“Is that really why?” Jake said.

Leon shrugged. “Of course. “

“You fucking liar,” Jake said, but there was no real heat behind the words. “I saw you guys talking. For god’s sake, he’s an insane terrorist who sprouts tentacles when he’s worked up. The least you can do is treat him like one. He doesn’t need you to coddle him.”

Leon felt a weird pressure behind his cheeks, and it took him a minute to realize that he was blushing. He took another swig of vodka, as if that would cover it up. “You’re taking things out of context.”

“What context could make that okay?” Jake snapped.

“The one where he’s a human being,” Leon said. “One who’s hurt and scared.”

“Oh my god. Do not pull this shit, Leon.”

“Things could have been a lot worse if I hadn’t talked him down,” Leon said. “The real context is all the shit you missed while you were hiding in the hallway feeling sorry for yourself, so you don’t get to question what I did now.”

“You don’t even know him. You never even met him.”

“Neither did you.”

Jake went quiet all at once. His hands tightened on the arms of his chair and he sat back, very stiff and rigid.

“Shit,” Leon said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“No,” Jake said. “You’re fine. I get you.”

He sighed. When he reached for the bottle of vodka, Leon handed it over immediately. “Look, just tell me what he was like. Can you do that? It might make me feel better, in a couple of ways.”

Leon shrugged. He eyed the bottle, which Jake seemed to have no intention of giving up any time soon.  Though he knew that he’d had plenty already and it was high time he gave someone else a turn, he thought that just being able to hold it might help ease his mind.

“It’s hard to tell exactly,” Leon said. “He’s in shock and he’s pretty out of it. There were a couple of times when he was lucid, though. He asked about you.”

“Damnit…”

“Relax, I didn’t tell him anything. I guess there were some things he never knew either, though.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed abruptly into slits of shrewd, distrust. “So, what? You want me to say that makes it okay? Do you want me to forgive him?”

“No. I’m just saying—“

“My mom wanted me to forgive him, too. And I swear, she almost never made me mad, but when she did that, it made me furious. When I got in the army, I met a lot of other guys with absentee dads. They all seemed to idealize them, like it came easy to them because they’d never met them, or only ever met them once in passing. It was just natural for them to build them up into better men than they were. Not me, though. I always knew just what he was, and I always knew just who I was. And I know who you are too, Leon.”

“Good,” Leon said. “Then you can keep track of it for both of us.”

***

Wesker finally roused when they were somewhere over Coahuila, which made the last few hours of the flight pretty awkward. No one wanted to talk about the elephant in the room when the elephant was actually conscious to hear you.

While Jake lay down across one of the seats and desperately pretended to be asleep, Leon managed to get Wesker to drink some water and pop another pain pill. The hole over his heart hadn’t closed yet, which went counter to everything Leon knew about the man and his uncanny ability to heal. The wound had stopped bleeding, but the edges of it sucked inward every time he took a breath. It took him almost a full minute to sit up.

“Where are we?” he asked at last.

“On a plane.”

“Yes.” Wesker took a shaky breath and pressed his palm over the wound in his chest. “Going where?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Leon said. “But I don’t think I should tell you that just yet.”

“Another laboratory, then.”

“No,” Leon said. “No way.”

“I don’t suppose it would do any good to offer you money. Or to beg.”

Leon felt his throat constrict. Though Wesker was watching him calmly, without a single furrow on his immaculate brow or the hint of a quiver in his voice, the words were still enough to lodge a sliver of ice in Leon’s belly.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’m taking you someplace safe. You’re not going back there if I have anything to say about it.”

“What makes you think you might have something to say about it?”

“Based on my track record?” Leon said. “Not a hell of a lot. But I want you to know that you can trust me, and I’ll try to trust you until you give me a reason not to. How does that sound?”

“Adequate.”

Leon laughed, without much feeling. “You must be a fun guy at parties. At least give me an idea of how you’re holding up. It’s about three hours until we land.”

“I’m fine,” Wesker said.

“Yeah? You look it.”

“What would you rather I say? Shall I tell you of how they abused me?” Wesker narrowed his eyes. “I think you would like that.”

“I’m not sure how to take that,” Leon said. “But if you want to talk about it, I can listen.”

“I most certainly do not want to talk about it.”

“All right,” Leon said. “I get it. Let me know if you change your mind. I’m not going to say I understand exactly, but I want to help if I can.”

Wesker looked at him steadily for a long moment. His eyes were no longer the clear, unclouded blue they had been in his youth, nor the fiery and inhuman red that they had been at the end. They were somewhere in between: dull, muddy purple, like two deep bruises stamped in the middle of his face.

He glanced away abruptly. “I’m fine. I just need to rest. My body will recover soon.”

“There’s no need to push it,” Leon said. “You’re not as young as you used to be.”

Wesker shot him a sharp look, but said nothing.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Leon said. Though he didn’t expect Wesker to appreciate it much, Leon leaned across the gulf between the seats and clapped him on the shoulder. His muscles felt hard and brittle, like one of those deceptively light woods harvested deep in the Amazon Basin, or those delicate, translucent minerals that broke into splinters at a touch.

A tremor slid along Wesker’s arm and he inclined his head so a few locks of hair fell over his face. He was forcing himself not to flinch, not to pull away.

Leon kept his hand where it was for a moment longer. He was going pretty far out of his way to trust Wesker after all, and the least Wesker could do was make an attempt to do the same.

But Wesker didn’t move, and Leon slowly got to his feet and made his way to the front of the plane.

***

Once they made it across the border, they switched to a smaller chartered flight. In upstate New York, they touched down at one of the podunk regional airports. It was late and there was just a skeleton crew on the ground, which was just fine by Leon. He didn’t suppose there was any way they were going to squeeze through without attracting attention, but he didn’t want to get the whole Eastern Seaboard talking.

A car was waiting in the parking lot. The keys were in the visor. He got Wesker bundled into the back seat where he sat, rigid and still. Leon turned around to get behind the wheel and he realized Jake was no longer with him.

Leon backtracked until he found him, back by the terminal door, waiting. “Guess you decided,” he said.

“I’m not coming,” Jake said. “Sorry. Are you going to be all right?”

“Ashley worked something out for me,” Leon said. “Should be fine for a while.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know,” Leon said. “But what do you want me to say? You’re the one who wanted to know what happened to him.”

“I didn’t want to know what happened to him. I wanted to know what happened to his fucking money.”

“Ah, right.”

“So, what?” Jake said. “You’re pissed at me now?”

“No,” Leon said. “I’m not.  But, you know, he’s here now and you might regret it if you don’t get some closure.”

“Closure?” Jake scoffed. “Nothing was ever left open. I’m sorry, this was a really stupid idea, and that’s my fault. But you shouldn’t have brought him back here. He’s not worth saving.”

“Maybe,” Leon said. “But I’m stuck with him now. Seeing as how I’m not getting any help.”

“I knew a guilt trip was coming.”

“He is your father,” Leon said quietly.

“And he might as well be a stranger to me. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that.  Don’t pretend you all of a sudden know what it’s like to come from a fucked up family—“

“This isn’t about my family,” Leon said, and he knew he had said it too quickly for it to sound anything but desperate.

Jake looked at him steadily, without curiosity or pity.  He had that much, at least, in common with Wesker.

“Are you really going to be all right alone with him?” Jake said.

“We’re not going to kill each other if that’s what you mean.” Leon sighed. “You’d better get going. I’m not going to ask you to stay if it’s that hard for you.”

“Are you mad at me or not?” Jake sniffed.

“Goodbye, kid. Let me know if you hear from Sherry.”

Leon walked back to the car. Wesker was an immobile shadow in the back seat, a ghost carved out of granite.

“Sorry,” Leon said. He didn’t know if Wesker wanted him bringing up his kid right now, so he just added weakly. “I forgot something.”

Wesker didn’t answer right away, long enough for Leon to assume he was getting the silent treatment. It wasn’t until he had pulled out and started to drive down the empty state road that wound away from the airport that he realized Wesker was fast asleep. His spine was still straight, his chin still possessed of an arrogant tilt; only the slight declination of his shoulders indicated that he was completely exhausted.

***

Leon followed the GPS out past the edge of town, turning off the highway and onto a private road that snaked for a good three miles through the trees.  They were big, stately oaks, their tops lost in the darkness overhead. Leon only knew they were there by the way they curved over the road, leaving only a thin ribbon of naked sky right down the center.

When they had spoken on the phone earlier, Ashley Graham had called the place her family’s summer cottage.  No one went there anymore, she had said, but a local girl came out to tidy it up once a month.

They came out the other side of the trees.  The cabin was at the end of a long unpaved driveway, butted up against a lake and veiled by woods. It was a lot bigger than Leon had expected. It had a couple of stories, a big enclosed deck on the second floor, and a façade made to look like chinked and fitted logs.

Leon parked around back so the car would be hard to spot both from the water and the road. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now. He got Wesker out and made him walk a little. It was slow going, but they managed to negotiate the steps up to the porch and get inside.

The inside of the cabin had the same rustic affectations as the outside. The main room was cavernous, with a vaulted chalet ceiling and reclaimed wood floors. A big, cold fireplace dominated the center of the room, and a herd of artfully rough-hewn chairs were clustered around it.

Leon let Wesker down on the big sectional sofa. He slumped forward so his hair fell over his face. When his hands twitched against his thigh, his fingers looked bone-thin and twisted, like spiders that had been stepped on.

“You okay?” Leon said. He wiped his palms on his jeans; they suddenly felt clammy.

Wesker tilted his head to the side, turning it just enough that for Leon to catch a glimpse of one of his uncanny bruise-colored eyes. The iris seemed completely opaque, absorbing all light from the tasteful chandelier overhead.

“All right,” Leon said. “Stupid question.”

He managed a smile, but he knew it wasn’t convincing. “I need a drink of water, but I’ll be right back. Try not to fall asleep. I want to take a look at that wound on your chest.”

Wesker didn’t move, though Leon waited around longer than he should have for a response. Finally, he backed away and headed for the kitchen.

There was a note on the sleek, stainless steel counter. In a few impersonal lines it directed him to the food in the fridge, the furnace in the basement, the spare toothbrushes and towels in the hall closet. Though he didn’t think he had ever seen Ashley Graham’s handwriting before, somehow Leon recognized the tall, even copybook script as hers. It could have been no one else’s, unchanged as it was since she had first labored over learning the letters in a grade school class.

There was little in that prim handwriting that resembled Ashley as Leon had last seen her. He’d been able to tell, even then, not six weeks after getting back from Spain, that she had lost weight. She’d always been pretty small, but he’d spent enough time hefting her up and hauling her around that he knew she had lost flesh from her bones. She’d worn a big hoodie and jeans, and her hair - jet black with little ribbons of yellow showing at the roots - had hung in her face.

Most of all, he remembered her expression, the way she had smiled graciously and to Leon it had seemed sincere enough. He should have known better; indeed he must have known, even then, that the expression had been well and agonizingly practiced. Pieced together from memories and things she had seen in movies, a plaster cast to flimsily contain the horror within.

After Raccoon City he had done the same thing, shoring up fragments against his ruin. He hadn’t known what else to do, how else to face the monstrous terror of it all. Sherry was the same, and Claire, and even Chris. And Wesker, now, or so Leon wanted to believe, not out of any need or sick compulsion to see the man suffer, but just so that there could be no more mysteries between them.

Leon tore the plastic off the pallet of bottled water in the cupboard. He broke the seal on one of the bottles and drank it down in a single swallow. Once the edge had been taken off his thirst, he glanced up at the other bottles, the glass ones on the top shelf of the cupboard. He started to reach for one, but then stopped himself short. Instead, he grabbed another water for himself, and then a third for Wesker. No matter what either of them thought about the situation, Wesker was waiting, and he needed Leon now.

Leon pasted a smile on his face as he headed back out to the main room. “I’ve got something to drink. Are you still awake?”

Wesker didn’t answer, and Leon caught himself hoping he actually was asleep, or dead. Or, better still, vanished. Escaped back into the world where he could be someone else’s problem.

But when he came around the sofa he saw that Wesker’s eyes were open and watching him closely. His irises were muddy, a flat shade of purple, almost the same color as the dark circles under his eyes.

Leon sighed, handing over the water. “Just drink it. Maybe you don’t need to, but it can’t hurt.”

While Wesker twisted the cap off the water, Leon took a seat on the coffee table; facing him, but not too close.

“Look,” he said. “Jake saw the files they left behind. He told me everything. We both know what happened, but I guess I can’t really know what it was like.”

“No, you can’t,” Wesker said sharply. “But I doubt that will stop you from trying.”

He brought the bottle of water to his mouth and drank furiously. As soon as he had lowered it again, he began to unbutton his shirt. “The wound ought to be cleaned,” he said. “But it will close on its own.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Leon replied. He watched as Wesker let his shirt slide off his shoulders. His skin seemed more bronze than tanned, strangely smooth and poreless, as if he had been cast from metal rather than flesh.  Wesker slipped out of the shirt and let it drop. Leon realized he was staring, and he looked away quickly.

Wesker hardly seemed to notice. He was probably used to being admired.

Leon cracked open the first aid kit and got out the bottle of antiseptic. Wesker reached for it, but Leon didn’t hand it over. “It’s all right. Let me do it for you.”

Wesker looked like he was barely able to suppress his irritation, but he reclined on the sofa so Leon could get to his chest. Leon dabbed the antiseptic onto the puckered edges of the wound. It really was a lot smaller than it had been. Wesker sucked in a deep breath when Leon touched him, and his body ratcheted up tight as if he was fighting the urge to pull away.

“Not much longer now,” Leon reassured him.

He finished the hole in Wesker’s chest, then he had him turn over so he could take care of the exit wound in his back. Though the hole just inside Wesker’s left shoulderblade was bigger, it wasn’t so terrible to look at. Leon cleaned it out, then he set a hand on Wesker’s shoulder, just a light touch so Wesker would know what he was doing.

“Want me to take care of your leg too?”

“Yes,” Wesker replied quietly. He turned over on his back and arched his hips so he could work his jeans down.  Again, Leon stared, and this time he felt an uncomfortable tightness in the back of his throat. He didn’t know why he had expected _that_ part of Wesker to be any less impressive and intimidating than the rest of him.

“It’s freezing,” Wesker snapped, hacking the thought off short as if with a blade.

“Sorry,” Leon muttered. He taped a square of gauze onto Wesker’s thigh over the patch of missing skin. Then he jerked a blanket up and over him. Without looking up to meet Wesker’s eyes, Leon said, “That’s about all I can do for now. Need anything else?”

Wesker’s lips parted. They were the same uncanny bronze color as his skin, and against them his teeth looked very white. “Water.”

Leon handed over the last bottle. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

“No,” Wesker said quietly. “No more.”

At that, Leon looked away. When Wesker spoke to him like that, in that weak, weary, contrite voice, it made him feel more embarrassed then when he had been caught staring earlier. “All right. I’ll take the chair, then. I can sleep just about anywhere.”

Wesker didn’t look at him. He had hooked his sculpted thumb nail under the plastic label on his water bottle and he was slowly peeling it away, a task which seemed to require his full attention and a not insignificant percentage of his strength. “That’s good,” he said, so softly that Leon could almost pretend he hadn’t heard him. “Don’t go.”

It must have cost him something in the coin of humiliation to get the words out. If this was half as hard for him as it was for Leon, then Leon supposed that was something. “I wasn’t planning on it,” he said. “You’ve got to be exhausted, but I’m not good for much else either.”


	15. Chapter 15

Leon slept for a few hours, and when he woke up it was still dark. He would have liked to roll over and shut his eyes against the new, uncertain, and ridiculous world he had awakened in, but practical concerns called him up short. He’d slept with his head wedged into the corner of the chair, his cheek pressed against the tasteful floral upholstery, which had no doubt burned its red brand indelibly into his cheek. For better or worse, Leon was wide awake now, irritable and with a pounding headache.

He twisted around in the chair, forcing his stiff vertebrae to uncouple. The sofa across from him, where he had left Wesker hunched in unpeaceful sleep, was empty now, with pillows fluffed and arranged at one end and the blanket creased and folded with military precision at the other.  

Scowling, Leon straightened up. He didn’t think Wesker would have slipped out during the night, not in the state he was in, but he still seemed to be determined to cause as much trouble as possible. While Leon was trying to figure out what his next move should be, a tremendous crash from the other room brought him fully and completely awake. His hand flew to the gun in the holster strapped against his ribs, and he lurched to his feet. The afghan he had pulled over himself tangled around his legs and he stumbled, bracing himself against the sofa.

Another metallic clang followed on the heels of the first. This one was quieter, like an apology for all the noise. Leon sighed, chucking the blanket back onto the chair. He had the hood guard that fitted over his gun unhooked, the piece already halfway out and in his hand. He reluctantly let it fall back into place before heading back to the kitchen.

Wesker was bent over the big island in the center of the room, sorting through a tangle of cookware. Though his back was to the door, his head came up in a sharp jerk when Leon stepped across the threshold. He turned, gripping the edge of the counter in one hand to steady himself.

“It’s you,” he said.

“Who else would it be?” It didn’t sound as tossed-off and careless as Leon had hoped; his voice was a raw whisper, a rasp. “What are you doing?”

“I felt hungry.”

“Me too,” Leon said. He came forward a step, moving slowly and deliberately, keeping his hands in plain view, skirting Wesker the way he would a strange and unpredictable animal. “Let me take care of it. You shouldn’t be on your feet.”

Wesker looked at him warily, then ceded his spot at the counter. He moved more easily than he had the day before, but he still limped heavily and he held himself with great care, as if with a newfound understanding of how fragile his body was. He made his way over to one of the barstools clustered around the kitchen island and eased himself up onto it.

Leon watched him until he was settled. “Did you have something in mind?”

“No. I don’t really know how to prepare food.”

“I’m not exactly a five-star chef myself,” Leon said. “But I can manage.”

Eggs was about the best he could do, but he supposed that even Wesker, for all his refined and rarified tastes, could get by on scrambled eggs. “Did you start coffee?” he asked.

“I don’t consume caffeine,” Wesker said quietly.

“Right,” Leon sighed. He got the coffee going, while Wesker watched him coolly. He seemed to be making notes, storing up all the knowledge he would need to repeat the steps himself next time and spare himself the humiliation of asking for help.

Annoyed, Leon poured himself half a cup of coffee, leaving plenty of room in the mug. He went to the cabinet where the liquor was kept and jerked it open. No sense pretending he hadn’t been thinking about it all along; no point pretending he hadn’t been revolving around it in an increasingly shrinking orbit from the moment he’d stepped into the kitchen.

He dug out another bottle of water and tossed it to Wesker. Then he got the whiskey off the top shelf and used it to top off his coffee. He took a long drink, burning the inside of his mouth. When he looked up, Wesker was watching him with mild curiosity, the water bottle unopened in his hand.

“Never thought I’d wind up a drunk,” Leon said, staring Wesker down, daring him to say something, daring him to pass judgment. “But there you go.”

Wesker looked at him in silence, then he handed the bottle of water over.

“Fuck off,” Leon snorted. “Take your concern and fuck off.”

“I am a doctor,” Wesker said.

Leon took the bottle and drained it. He followed it up with another swig of coffee before he started to feel human again. He got out some eggs and bacon, and he went with the whole grain bread for toast, since that seemed like something Wesker would appreciate.

All the while, Wesker watched him with cool, calculating eyes. “Alcoholism is much more prominent among individuals who have suffered an intense emotional trauma.”

“Is that your opinion as a doctor?” Leon said. “I hate to tell you, but your bedside manner sucks.”

“I’m not a practicing physician,” Wesker replied. “But it’s common medical knowledge.”

“It’s not exactly news to me, either,” Leon said. “I’ve been to enough therapists to know what’s wrong with me, but that doesn’t mean I can change it. That I even want to change it.”

“I think I understand.”

“You’d better,” Leon said. “You were there, too. You’ve been where I have.”

For an instant, Wesker’s muddy eyes turned sharp, twin lenses focusing on a specimen.  You could practically see the gears turning up there, ominous portents of a fierce intelligence at work.

Leon looked away, intimidated, turning the whole of his attention to the eggs and bacon sputtering in their pans. He plated them up, passing one over to Wesker.  Leon dug into his; it tasted pretty good, the way food could only taste after you had been without it for a while. Wesker went about eating his more slowly and methodically, his steely jaw grinding itself against each bite.

He might have at least acted like he was enjoying it, the prick.

“I’ve considered your assertion,” Wesker said. “And I think you need to amend it. Whether I was with you in Raccoon City or anywhere else, we are not the same. Because it all began with me. I put us there, and you were merely drawn along in the wake of the current.”

“You want me to blame you,” Leon said around a bite of scrambled egg. “Like I never thought of that before. Believe me, I tried to make it all your fault. Like Chris would have wanted. Like he told me to. But it didn’t hang together for me.  It didn’t shake out.”

Wesker was quiet for a long time. “Did Chris really say that?”

“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” Leon said. “He said that, more or less. Are you surprised?”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m not that either.”

“Then why bring it up?” Leon barely managed to suppress a grim smile by cramming a corner of bacon into his mouth. “Anyway, I still don’t think it’s your fault.”

“Chris and I have known each other for a very long time now,” Wesker said. He seemed determined to ignore what Leon was trying to tell him, and that was just fine with Leon. Still chewing on the last bite of egg, Leon put his empty plate in the sink, then he turned and freshened up his coffee.

“Do you want any?” he asked. “No, I guess not. I think I saw some tea in the cupboard, though. I bet you’re into tea.”

“I’ll drink some tea,” Wesker said quietly.

Leon boiled the water for him. After a while, Wesker said, “Have you heard from Chris recently?”

“From time to time.”

“How is he?”

“Pretty well. Better than you might think, considering everything he’s been through.” Leon poured the tea and handed it over.

“You mean on account of me?” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Leon said. “I didn’t just mean you, but you had a hand in it. You sure were putting him through his paces for a while in there. Anyway, he’s all right. No permanent damage, I don’t think.”

“Just as at home in the world of peace as he was in the world of war, if not even more so. That is how I always imagined him. But then, are not the Chris Redfields always at home in every world? Just as the Leon Kennedys are never at home in any.”

Leon managed a laugh, but it had a nervous edge to it. “Where does that leave the Albert Weskers?”

“Above, beyond, and separate from such considerations.”

“That’s right, I forgot. Though you’ll forgive me for thinking that sounds exactly like something a person batting for Team Leon might say to make himself feel better.”

***

After he’d finished his coffee, Leon went out to move the car somewhere more secure. He ended up taking it a little ways down the lakeshore and parking it behind one of the other empty cabins. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best Leon could do under the circumstances. He still wanted them to be able to get back to the vehicle and make a quick getaway if they had to.

He took his time walking back, making his way along the beach. It was still early enough that steam was rising from the lake and the leaves on the trees were stiff, like colored stones, from having been frosted over the night before.

Leon didn’t think about it much these days, but he’d always liked being out in nature. When he had been growing up, his dad had some weird friends. Survivalist types, who were always talking about their plans for weathering the coming armageddon. They’d run through a lot of scenarios, but not a single one of them had come anywhere close to guessing the form the inevitable apocalypse would really take.

Still, mixed in amongst the gun nuts and the nuclear bunker enthusiasts, there were a few who were planning to live off the land. To decamp to some untouched wilderness and wait out the end of days hunting and foraging. As a kid, Leon had always thought that sounded like the best option, the only cure that wasn’t worse than the disease. And when, years later, the world really had almost ended, he had found himself thrown violently back into childhood, contemplating again how nice it would be if he could only hide forever in a place a lot like this one.

When he got back to the cabin, Leon knocked before letting himself in. He felt silly doing it, but he thought Wesker might like the advanced warning. There was no telling how jumpy he really was.

Leon checked the big front room and the kitchen, but Wesker was nowhere to be found. Considering the number that had been done on his leg, Leon hadn’t thought he would be in any hurry to negotiate the stairs, but he supposed you didn’t get to be Wesker by letting something like that stand in your way.

The other option, of course, was that Wesker had given him the slip while he was outside, but that was the last thing Leon wanted to contemplate.

He did a thorough check of the first floor, and then headed upstairs. He opened some of the doors up and down the hall, revealing a row of tasteful and understated bedrooms and baths. The place was bigger than his damn condo, and he was pretty sure the Ansel Adams on the wall cost more than his lease.

Wesker turned up at last, in the big office down at the end, browsing a shelf full of distinguished-looking leather books. He had found a change of clothes somewhere: work pants and a plaid shirt that were both too big around the torso and too short in the limbs. Leon supposed not many clothes were cut to Wesker’s immaculate wishful-thinking body type.

When Leon came inside, Wesker glanced in his direction but said nothing. He went back to the shelf that currently had his attention and didn’t spare Leon another look.

Leon was starting to think that he might have the right idea. They had to do something to pass the time. Fortunately, he was good at finding ways to fill up his days. Since going on retainer, he hadn’t exactly picked up any hobbies, but he had accumulated distractions. He spent a couple of hours every day reading the news, and he watched about a dozen different series as they popped up on Netflix. Occasionally he cracked one of those big thick novels that no adult with responsibilities could possibly have the time to get around to reading, but he never did it to wrestle with the themes. He just let himself be buoyed along by the language, as if he were resting in the bottom of a rowboat on the river, drifting past a parade of brightly colored banners.

Starting on the shelf in the corner furthest from Wesker, Leon picked out a couple of likely candidates, but when he tried to open the first he found that the spine was still stiff and the gold-edged pages uncut. They had not been bought with the intention of being read.

Once, while he had still been at the police academy in Denver, Leon had wandered into a Russian restaurant in the grubby part of downtown. He’d heard they’d cleaned up that part of town a lot since he’d last been there – put in some condos and cupcake bakeries and whatever else they did – but back then it had been genuinely rough.

Long story short, the Russian restaurant had clearly been some kind of front for money laundering. He wasn’t a cop yet, so Leon figured it wasn’t his place to make a scene. Still, what had struck him was how surprised, how down right annoyed, the owner had looked when Leon had had the gall to walk into his place during business hours.

Those disused books, stiff with age, reminded Leon a lot of that restaurant and its owner.

Down at the bottom of one of the shelves, a thick paperback volume caught his eye. Leon crouched down and pulled it out. The cover flopped open gamely. It was a modern translation of _The Odyssey_ , with a library barcode affixed to the inside cover, and a stamp declaring it _Property of Bryn Mawr_.

One of Ashley’s, Leon assumed. There were a couple of Post-Its stuck to the pages, but they were all before the halfway point. Clearly, not much progress had been made. It was all a little Freshmen English, but Leon slipped it into the pocket of his jacket anyway.

As he straightened up, Wesker abruptly spoke to him. “Being in a room full of books always feels familiar.”

Leon looked over at him, surprised, but Wesker was still facing the bookcase, as if he had not said anything at all.

“The Spencer Estate had a great library,” he continued, taking down one of the volumes and flipping through the fat sheathes of uncut pages. “There were many works like these, but they were all behind glass. I was not allowed access to them. I never knew who had the key, or whether there even was one.”

Wesker stared at the book in his hand as if it were written in a language he did not understand. He slammed the cover shut and placed it back on the shelf.

“My leg hurts,” he said quietly. “I’m going to rest.”

He had to walk past Leon on the way to the door, and Leon shrank away from him as he went by.

In his absence, Leon felt very badly that he needed another drink to steady his nerves. He followed Wesker down, closing the door to the upstairs office on his way out. Wesker was sitting on the sofa, his foot propped up on the table. A few spots of blood had soaked through the fabric of his jeans. Two were old, but one of them looked fresher.

“Want me to put a fresh bandage on that?” Leon said.

Wesker shook his head. “No. It’s better than it was. I can walk now, with hardly any difficulty at all.”

“Suit yourself,” Leon said. He shrugged, and felt something jab him in the ribs. When he reached into his jacket pocket, he found the paperback library book he had retrieved from upstairs.

Leon tossed it on the table. He had forgotten taking it.

“I’m going to have a drink,” he said. “Do you want one?”

“No,” Wesker said. Then he paused and he amended, “Yes. Yes, I’d like a drink.”

Unwilling to admit how much that answer relieved him, Leon went into the kitchen and retrieved a bottle and two glasses. When he came back out, Wesker had picked up the primary bound copy of _The Odyssey_. He flipped back the laminate cover and stared at the little rote “About the Author” page on the inside flap without seeming to see it.

“ _Thanatos de toi ex halos autoi ablechros mala toios eleusetai, hos ke se pephnei gerai hupo liparoi aremenon: amphi de laoi olbioi essontai_ ,” he said.

“Huh?” said Leon.

“A painless death will steal upon you, far from the sea, with hallowed peace around you.”

“Oh yeah,” Leon said. “I know that one.”

Leon paused to pour out two tidy measures, four fingers deep. He handed one to Wesker and said, “What should we drink to? The end of the world?”

“Yes,” Wesker replied. “To the end of the world.”  

That suited Leon just fine. He tilted his head back and drank the whiskey down in a single swallow. He felt better almost immediately.

Wesker was still nursing his drink, taking little sips that barely even seemed to wet his lips. Like the way some small bird or finicky housecat would drink. Leon was pretty sure he didn’t even know how to let loose and take a shot. Wesker hardly seemed like the type to have gotten crazy back in college. Hell, he didn’t seem like the type to have gone to college at all. More like the type to have hatched from an egg, or to have emerged fully-grown from a chrysalis, or from beneath the skin on the back of a toad.

“I guess you speak Greek,” Leon said, eyeing him. “That must be useful in your line of work.”

“I used to,” Wesker said. “Latin as well. I’ve forgotten most of them. Only a few parlor tricks remain.”

“I thought all you hard science guys hated the liberal arts.”

“It’s a nostalgic weakness of mine,” Wesker replied. “I liked the Classics when I was younger. All that knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone. When I was about seven or eight, I imagined myself a youth in Athens, sitting at the feet of Socrates and learning from him, all those things I needed to fully comprehend art, and justice, and the human soul. High-minded nonsense, all of it.”

There was probably a lot to unpack there, not the least of which being what Wesker might have looked like in one of those cute little pleated skirts they wore in ancient Greece. But instead Leon just said, “When I was a little kid and I imagined what it must have been like back then, all the buildings looked like ruins. Like everyone just lived in the ruins of some temple to some goddess or something. That’s the way it always is in the movies, and I guess I couldn’t think of it any other way.”

“I haven’t seen those films,” Wesker said. “Only the Renaissance painting that hung in the hall. It had Zeus and Io as its subject, but the setting was one more familiar to the artist. She in a gown and veiled hat, and a turreted keep looming behind them Shakespeare did much the same thing. So for a long time all the past flowed together for me, as if into a single monolithic not-present. Tudor kings and Spartan hoplites and da Medician courtiers all existing side by side.”

Leon chuckled in spite of himself. “That’s pretty adorable.”

He figured Wesker would be offended, or at least flustered, but he laughed a little as well. It was just a soft hiss of breath, barely a sound at all, but it was unmistakable. “I was an adorable child.”

“I can tell.”

Leon leaned back against the arm of the couch. His glass was empty, and it probably had been for a good five minutes, but he set it aside without feeling tempted to fill it again. “I can’t believe you read all that shit when you were eight. When I was that age I was still mouthing my way through _My Side of the Mountain_. I didn’t get into real, you know, _literature_ until high school. For a while, I even thought I’d like to be a teacher. Like, I’d be sitting there reading Hemmingway and think, ‘I can’t believe more people don’t know about this.’ I’d feel like I had to tell someone. I had to lay it all out there so they could see it too.”

“And yet?” Wesker said.

“And yet here I am, you mean?” Leon shrugged.

“I hope you don’t think I’m being presumptuous, but you are a long way from a natty tweed blazer with chalk-stained lapels.”

“You are being presumptuous,” Leon said. “It’s all right, though. I don’t mind talking about it.”

He glanced at his empty glass again, but didn’t move to top it up. “My dad was a highway patrolman. Now there was someone who didn’t have any patience for the liberal arts. He kept trying to get me into sports when I was a kid, but I was smaller than the other boys, and clumsier, and I had no competitive spirit. If some kid was running for the end zone, I’d just let him go. He looked like he wanted it, and who was I to disappoint him, you know?

“I had a big brother, four years older than me. He was kind of the buffer between me and my dad. I might have been a disappointment, but my old man wasn’t going to have a heart attack and end up in an early grave over it as long as he had my brother. Tom was my polar opposite. He started football when he was four, hockey when he was six. Never got into soccer, because I guess it was too European. He did round up some friends and start a lacrosse team when he was ten.

“He got into the state university on a football scholarship, and he decided to do criminal justice. He wanted to be a cop, just like my dad. And as long as he was on that big straight road, I was safe to go off and explore whatever side streets and alleyways I wanted.”

Leon didn’t think that paused or hesitated then, but Wesker interjected smoothly, without giving the impression of interrupting in the slightest. “How did your brother die?”

“Shot,” Leon replied, unsurprised that Wesker had surmised the truth so easily. “On campus one day. Some kid in his dorm went off his meds and he took a gun and went down the hall, opening the doors to all the rooms and firing into them. My brother was on the floor above, but he heard the shots and he went to help. He tried to stop it, and that’s how he got killed. That’s what they say. I never got a lot of the specific details, but they say he was just trying to help.”

“I see,” Wesker said. “In his absence you felt obligated to assume his responsibilities. We all have duties to our fathers, after all.”

Leon’s jaw tightened. He felt himself trying to smile grimly. “Thanks for not telling me how sorry you are.”

“I assumed you knew what pity your story arouses.

“Maybe. It just gets really old hearing about it all the time.”

When Wesker didn’t answer, Leon went on. “You’re right and you’re wrong. After it happened, I don’t think anyone was thinking about duty or responsibility, or even whether having a net increase of cops in the world would be able to prevent something like that from happening again. Everyone was just angry. Sad, of course, but somehow more angry than sad.

“My dad said we could all move on after the shooter was sentenced. As long as he went to jail for a long time, that would be justice and we could all get over being angry. And the guy did go to jail for a long time. I mean, he had been sick when it happened. Looking back now, I can tell how sick he must have been. But it doesn’t really change the fact that when you kill five people, you go to jail. He’s still in there, as far as I know, if he’s alive. But his going to jail didn’t really do much to dissipate the anger. My dad said he should have gotten the death penalty. I didn’t agree with capital punishment – I guess I still don’t, though maybe extrajudicial assassination isn’t much different? I didn’t support it in general, but in this case it’s not like I could work up much of a head of steam to disagree, you know?”

“Capital punishment is the mark of a barbaric society,” Wesker said mildly.

“There was just all this rage, and loss, and grief floating around. I couldn’t stand it. I finally thought, fine, I’ll do it. I’ll become my brother. Not just follow in his footsteps, but become him. Because if I did that then he would be back, and everyone would be happy. And I wouldn’t have to be there, cluttering everything up, with my pitiful little dreams of tricking eighth graders into liking _Huck Finn_.”

Leon broke off there, and when he looked up he realized that Wesker was watching him closely, with an expression of mild bemusement. “I suppose the real tragedy is that you are so very good at being the one thing you never wanted to be.”

“I guess I am good at it.”

“I’m good at what I do, too,” Wesker said.

“I heard you were good at everything.”

“Not everything,” Wesker said. “I never could have taught eighth grade.”

Leon laughed, barely. He reached over and picked the book up off the table, and he held it without opening it. “One of my shrinks told me that Odysseus exhibits classic signs of PTSD. He said that I should think about it that way, as part of a long and proud tradition.”

“The shrewdest move Odysseus made was slaughtering the sons of Ithaca. As abhorrent as is Oedipus’ murder of Laertes, at least that is a case of a son killing his father. That is the natural order of things. For a father to kill a son, though. For the older generation to prevent the younger from coming to maturity. That shows real tactical forethought.”

Leon laughed again, and it sounded a little less strained this time. “I think you and I are really different people, Wesker.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s cool. I like it.”

“I see.”

“What about you?”

“Do you want me to say that I like you?”

“I don’t know,” Leon admitted. “I guess I’d settle for gratitude. You never thanked me, you know. I went to a lot of trouble for you.”

“Thank you, Leon,” Wesker said. And he seemed to mean it. It seemed genuine enough, at any rate, that Leon was drawn up short by a sudden rush of blood to his cheeks.

“It doesn’t count if you have to ask for it,” he said. “Try to show a little initiative next time.”

Leon tossed the book back on the table and leaned forward enough to snag the bottle of whiskey. “Care for another?” he said.

“All right,” Wesker replied.


	16. Chapter 16

Wesker had left and gone upstairs. He could move a lot more easily, but Leon could see that was very careful now, stiff and cautious in his movements. He leaned on things when he could place a hand on them, but he made an effort to keep his back straight, as if by maintaining his regal posture he might preserve a little of his pride as well.

The cabin was all hardwood floors and boxy construction; sound carried easily. Leon could hear footsteps shuffling softly in the hallway and the upstairs rooms for a while, then all went silent.

Eventually, Leon got curious and followed him. He checked the room with the bookcases first, and found it empty and somehow forbidding. He tried some of the other closed doors along the upstairs hall, and he finally located Wesker in the master bedroom down at the opposite end. He was fast asleep on the big bed, curled into himself in a way that Leon found strangely touching. As if he had chosen this cavernous space out of anticipation of filling it, but in sleep he had shrunk down, aspiring to disappear.

Though Leon had been eager to finally put an end to the matter – to force Wesker to say something that would let Leon make a decision about him once and for all – he knew how unlikely that was to happen any time soon. You couldn’t force Wesker to do anything he didn’t want to, and besides, he wasn’t in any shape for anything like that.

Better to rest, wait it out. Save up what he could for the next inevitable calamity.

The Grahams had a decent record collection in crates downstairs, and Leon put on _Sketches of Spain_ and settled down in one of the chairs near the cold fireplace. He couldn’t sleep on planes, which meant that he’d gotten by on only fitful, unrefreshing naps for the last 48 hours. Still, Leon figured he should stay awake, keep watch. That someone ought to.

But even as he made the decision, even as he resolved to stay up as long as it took, his eyes were already growing heavy, his head nodding onto his breast.

Within a minute, he was fast asleep.

Hands came out of the shadowy corners, and from under the chair where he slept. They were bone white and decayed, the skin scaly in places, mummified in others. Patches had rotted away entirely, revealing sickly yellowish bone underneath. They stretched out towards him, cold dead flesh seeking his warmth, but they could not touch him.

The hands stopped just short, less than an inch from Leon’s body. Ancient knuckles cracked as the fingers stretched over him, more and more, interlacing until they formed a dead shroud over him.

His mouth flooded with the aftertaste of decay. He knew with perfect clarity that he was dreaming, but he couldn’t wake himself up. He had never been able to wake himself up. If only one of those dead hands would bridge the gap between them - sink its claws into his skin, force itself into his mouth, caress his cheek tenderly – then he knew that he would wake at once, but that would not come to pass.

He would stay here, he knew. A single living man beneath a growing cloak of the dead.

***

Eventually, the cold brought him around.

Leon almost never woke up gently, and this time the convulsions of the dispelling nightmare were enough to roll him out of the chair and on to the floor. His heart was hammering, and his clothes stuck to him with cold sweat. It seemed, though, that he had not screamed.

Nothing to see here, he thought, sorting himself out. Swinging his shoulder holster back into its proper place.

His head was pounding, and his mouth was sandpapery.

The shadows had grown long while he slept; it was evening now. A sliver of nervous guilt lodged itself in Leon’s gut. He’d been out for hours: fast asleep, as if he had solved anything, accomplished anything.

He needed to check on Wesker, call Jake. Do something. Fix something.

His head throbbed as he lurched to his feet, and he his stomach tightened. Leon stumbled into the kitchen and slapped the wall until he found the light switch. The bulb came on, dim and flickering. Outside, he could hear the wind battering the walls until they creaked. Cold radiated up through the floor. His feet were bare, but he didn’t feel it.

He grabbed an empty glass off the counter and thrust it under the faucet. When he turned on the tap, the pipes groaned once and then spit water in bursts. Leon filled the glass, and then gulped down its contents. It was so cold it burned the back of his throat and made him tear up.

It didn’t do a damn thing for his headache, for the knot in the back of his throat, his eyes that felt like they had swollen into slits.  He jerked the tap back on again and refilled the glass.

Behind him, something scuffed on the kitchen tile, the slow sound of something wet and loose being dragged, or dragging itself.

Leon dropped the glass. It didn’t break, but it rolled across the counter and fell into the sink. His gun was in his hand and the safety was off and his finger was already tense of the trigger before he realized what had happened, who he had caught in his sights.

He forced his trigger finger to unclench. His arm was slower to cooperate and lower the gun, but Wesker waited patiently for Leon to reset all his tripped switches. His hands were raised to the level of his shoulders, but he held them there as if the very notion of surrender was no more than an ironic joke to him.

“It’s only you,” Leon said.

“ _Only_ me?”

“I almost blew your head off,” Leon finally convinced the muscles in his shoulder to relax, and his hand dropped abruptly, as if the gun had suddenly become too heavy. He shoved it back into the holster under his arm, right where he needed it.

“How fortunate that you did not,” Wesker said vaguely. He lowered his hands slowly, holding them out a little from his side, palms towards the floor, a regular fucking _croise devant_. Like he couldn’t even move his damn arm six inches without making a huge deal about it.

Leon felt his temper flare. He turned away sharply, groping along the counter in search of the lost glass, finding only a trail of small puddles of spilled water. Wesker was still behind him. He knew that without looking, and he knew that he had not relaxed at all. His spine was still primly straight, his head up like he was balancing a book. His palms facing the floor, held out a little from his sides.

“Guess you’re feeling better,” Leon said.

“I’m feeling adequately,” Wesker replied. He seemed reticent to speak now, though Leon could still remember that he had been plenty talkative earlier. Leon eyed him over the rim of his glass as he dutifully drank the water down. The clamoring in his head had begun to ease, and some of the tension in his shoulders had slowly, minutely, started to chip away.

Wesker liked things to move at the pace he set for them. He wouldn’t say anything else until he was good and ready. That was too damn bad, Leon thought, his own viciousness surprising him. Whether Wesker liked it or not – whether he had even realized it or not – they were in this together, and they were going to act like it if it killed them.

“All the same,” Leon said. “I want to get a look at what they did to you. Make sure there’s no permanent damage.”

Wesker rolled his shoulder on the side he had been shot, as if to demonstrate the smoothness of the motion.

“Just humor me,” Leon said. “Go back in there and lay down.”

Wesker didn’t answer, didn’t even look like he was thinking about answering. He’d probably gotten out of the habit of responding to orders like that years ago. But when Leon headed for the door, Wesker followed with those uncanny soundless footsteps of his. Leon wondered if he’d always been like this: making practically no sound at all when he moved, as if he didn’t even displace the air around him.

Probably not. Leon had always known about Wesker, had always been peripherally aware of his movements in the shadowy corners of the world. He’d heard plenty from Chris, still more from Ada when he caught her in one of her rare talkative moods. But until Leon had opened the door to that cell deep beneath the permafrost, he had never actually laid eyes on Wesker in person.

Still, people talked, and from what he’d heard Leon had thought he’d had a pretty good handle on what to expect. To hear Chris tell it, Wesker was such a huge goddamn inconvenience you couldn’t miss his presence in your life. There seemed to be very little left of the man Chris had described, the lethal bombastic monster that he had always been just a couple of beers short of dredging up from the depths of his nightmares.

Wesker’s outward appearance was the same. His chiseled face, regal brow, straight spine, unnatural eyes; all looked as it should have, but there was something missing. He was like a carapace, a paper shell built around nothing at all.

It was probably better this way. If Wesker got the notion in his head to take up his old occupation where he had left off, Leon didn’t think there was much he’d be able to do to stop him. Even with the cocktail of viruses in his blood lying dormant, Wesker was still a force to be reckoned with. Leon didn’t doubt that, if he set his mind to it, Wesker could have pretty handily wrung Leon’s neck and split.

But for all his jumping at shadows and sleeping with one eye open, Leon wasn’t afraid of that. Wesker hadn’t shown any desire to leave the cabin, not even to set foot off the front porch.

He was scared shitless.

Even though Leon wanted to believe that it served him right after what he’d done, that train of thought didn’t sit right with him. Leon knew what it was like to live with fear, but he’d never been through anything like what he’d gotten a glimpse of back in Siberia. He doubted he ever would. He was just a grunt, a footsoldier, not the type to have to worry about torture. No one would ever want to waste time making him suffer.

Wesker kept his back to Leon as he slid out of his shirt. Despite his demonstration earlier, his left arm didn’t work as well as the right. Getting the sleeve off that side tripped him up for a split second.

Leon waited for him to lie down on the sofa, then he sat beside him. The seat was wide enough to accommodate both of them, but not without their hips touching, a point of contact that Leon was more than a little aware of.

Leon’s fingers brushed past the place on Wesker’s chest where the bullet had gone in. The wound had closed up, leaving nothing but a patch of livid black and blue. There was still a divot in the skin above his nipple, a soft spot, as if the foundation were faulty. He was missing a pretty good sized piece of one of his ribs by Leon’s estimation, though it didn’t seem to be causing Wesker much pain.

All the same, there might still be bone fragments in there. The last thing they needed was to have one of those worm its way into Wesker’s lung or heart. The virus was always at its most unpredictable when the host body was threatened; that was when the real weird mutations started to happen.  Wesker had been through enough without that.

Leon considered whether or not he should say as much to Wesker. By all accounts, he was pretty into that weird shit. He might take it as a good sign. It might be exactly what he was waiting for.

Too many drinks and too many blows to the head had left Leon’s memory of the past ten years or so pretty perforated in spots, but he did remember Spain, and Las Plagas. When they had infected him, he had been desperate to get those things out, but he could not deny that he had felt their seductive power. To succumb meant an end to pain, to fear. Not just the fear of the moment, but all fear ever. Not just pain, but pain’s entire history.

Perhaps that was what Wesker had been looking for as well. What he had almost found.

Leon glanced up at Wesker’s face, as if expecting confirmation, but there were no answers to be found in his flat, bruise-colored eyes.

“You’re staring,” Wesker said. “Again.”

“No.” Leon ducked his head, escaping Wesker’s uncanny gaze. “Sorry. I was just trying to remember something. It was right on the tip of my tongue…”

“Then you were not staring last night either? Or in the lab?”

Leon tried to laugh. It sounded like a gun dry firing in the back of his throat. “Maybe I was. You do look pretty good. I wasn’t thinking about it like that, but I guess you do look good.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Wesker said.

“Recently?”

“No, I don’t think so. But you won’t tell me how long it has been.”

“Like I said, it’s been a while.”

Wesker lifted himself on his elbows. “It must have been a long time indeed. You look much older.”

“You need work on returning compliments, Wesker.”

“You seem older.”

“Is it really bothering you that much?” Leon said. “Look, I don’t know exactly, but I guess you’ve been off the radar for about four years.”

Wesker’s brows knitted. The furrows that appeared where they met were deep enough to get Leon thinking that maybe he wasn’t the only one who had begun to look old.

“You’re sure?” Wesker said.

“No, I’m not sure. You’ve always been the BSAA’s white whale. Whatever I heard about you, I got from the rumor mill, and it was always more than I wanted to know.”

“There will always be rumors in our line of work.”

“International bioterrorism is a tiny scene,” Leon said, not sure himself whether he was agreeing or not. “Everyone knows one another.”

“We’re like one big happy family.”

“In that we drink and hurt each other?”

The wrinkles between Wesker’s brows smoothed minutely. Leon suspected that he was strongly considering that he might let a smile slip, which gave Leon an inordinate amount of pleasure.

Wesker sat up. Leon’s eyes were once more drawn to that hollow spot on his chest. It dimpled slightly when Wesker moved his shoulder. Noticing the direction of Leon’s gaze, he said, “I coughed up shrapnel this morning while you outside. I think it will all work its way out eventually.”

“It’s still weird to think that you died,” Leon said. He paused, considering whether he really wanted an answer to the next question. “How was it?”

Wesker was quiet for a while, long enough for Leon to wonder if he meant to reply at all, if he had forgotten the question entirely or even heard it in the first place. Leon finally made himself look up and meet Wesker’s muddy eyes. In truth he had been avoiding it; he had known that as soon as he did he would have to confront the fact that he and Wesker were sitting close enough to touch, and that it had not once crossed Leon’s mind to move back to a safe distance.

“Worse after the first time,” Wesker said at last. His jaw tightened. He didn’t like the memory, or he didn’t like making the confession.  “The hardest after the administration of the Uroborous virus.”

“And the most theatrical,” Leon said.

“You don’t understand,” Wesker replied, without accusation. He knew full-well that Leon couldn’t bridge the conceptual gulf between them any more than a goldfish could grasp of the idea of a bowl.  “That time, it was not the dying. It was the returning. If they had not found what was left of my body, perhaps I really would have died. Burned in that fire beyond ashes, beyond even memory. But there is a possibility that I would not have burned at all. That was the thought that obsessed me, over all those endless hours in that lab. What if I had lived, there under the ground, a viable seed forever trapped in that hot, and barren earth. Burning forever.”

Leon swallowed hard, with some effort, as if around a lump of ice lodged in his throat. “Is that what you’re afraid of? That somehow you’re still there?”

That he had left a part of himself behind in that place, at that moment when he was at his absolute worst.  There was something Leon could understand.

“I’m not afraid,” Wesker said quietly.

“Give me a break, Albert.”

This time Wesker really did laugh. “Don’t call me that. I’ve never gone by that. Even my own father called me Wesker.”

“Seems like you two had a real special relationship.”

“We did,” Wesker said. “And then I killed him. Though I suppose you heard about that as well.”

“I remember something to that effect.”

“It was self-defense. I had to get to him before he got to me.”

“It sounds like he already did.”

This brought Wesker up short, as if Leon had suddenly conjured a wall between them. Though Leon was impressed he had managed it, he didn’t like the overall effect. When Wesker turned away from him, Leon was possessed by a sudden and disorienting urge to go after him.

“What do you think you know about my life?” Wesker snapped, addressing the wall.

“Nothing,” Leon sighed. “Except that it must have been hard.”

Wesker said nothing, but his hands clenched against his thighs, not quite into fists. Christ, he was worse off than Leon had thought, at least as bad as he had expected when he had hauled him out of that lab. It didn’t make Leon feel any better to see. There was no relief in the attitude of human vulnerability suddenly cast upon Wesker’s young god’s face.

Before he had known he was going to seriously consider it, the thought that he should try to touch him had already leapt fully formed into Leon’s mind. Before he realized he was going to do it, the act was already done.

Leon pressed the tips of his fingers to Wesker’s cheek, and, when Wesker neglected to tear his arm off at the socket, he allowed his palm to follow. Wesker’s skin felt warm, but only because Leon’s fingers were slightly chill. Leon could not say whether he had expected Wesker’s body to radiate the heat of the caldera or the chill of the grave, but he knew that neither one would have surprised him as much as that modestly human warmth did.

Wesker’s expression went through a series of elaborate recalibrations, adjusting to the new sensory input. Leon shifted in his seat but did not move his hand. He had thought he might feel a graveling of stubble on Wesker’s jaw – he had not, as far as Leon knew, shaved since getting here – but the texture of his skin was uniformly smooth, as if not broken by so much as pore. It was as if he had been fashioned out of some metal that conducted heat inefficiently but that had been left to bake in the sun.

At last, Leon spoke. He had to do something.

“I can keep doing this, you know,” he said. “Being here. Waiting for something to happen. Protecting you from them. It’s weird, but I feel like I could keep doing all of that for a long time. But I want you to tell me that you’re sorry. Even if it’s just because you finally got a taste of your own medicine and it hurt, I want you to do at least that much.”

Wesker’s eyes swung back to his. “Do you mean that you want a personal apology?” he said, as bloodlessly as if he were going over a bit of obscure wording in some bothersome but necessary paperwork. “Or you want me to say that I am sorry any of it happened?”

“Both?” Leon replied. He hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question. He swallowed around the knot in his throat and tried again. “I want you to do both.”

Wesker seemed to be giving the matter some real thought. His expression retreated back into itself the way it did when he was really putting his mind to something. It actually seemed to recede physically, as if Wesker were going back over his steps, retracing everything, perhaps all the way back to the beginning, so he could find what he had missed or where he had gone astray.

“I can issue a personal apology to you,” he said at last. “If you are speaking of what happened in Spain, I mean.  You were in the way, but I did not have anything against you personally. I’m sorry it came to that.”

Leon sighed. He felt like an idiot. He started to let his hand fall, but Wesker caught it. Maybe it was just because he hadn’t been looking right at him, but Leon didn’t see his hand move at all. It had been at his side, resting on the sofa, and then it was against Leon’s wrist, holding his hand in place so that it was a little away from Wesker’s face but not allowed to retreat any further.

Wesker’s palm had the same uncanny metallic texture of his cheek. When it moved over Leon’s skin he half expected it to bring forth whispered tones, as if he had rubbed against the grain on a bronze statue.

“Wait,” Wesker said. “I am sorry, but only because you’re here now and I have to face you. I think that I would be sorry for almost any one of them, if I had to face them like this. But you cannot ask me to be sorry for all of it. You cannot ask me to regret what I wanted back then.”

Leon looked away, hoping that was the end of it. He’d asked for the apology, but he wasn’t even sure he wanted it now. Trying to drag it out of Wesker would only be painful for both of them.

“I am not that creature, that imperfect god, anymore,” Wesker continued slowly. His expression kept falling further away, going deeper into the past or into himself, trying to dredge something specific up from the deepest forgotten depths. “But sometimes, I can almost remember what it was like.”

His hand tightened on Leon’s, and Leon felt the small bones in his fingers shift and grind together. Wesker still had some steel behind that cardboard cutout body of his.

“I’ve been trying to sort out how much of those days was the influence of the virus on my mental faculties and how much was my own will. It’s hard going, though. At some point, the two became rooted together. The last thing I know with any certainty was the first time that I died. I chose that, without interference or coercion. I thought I was brave…”

“And what?” Leon said. “It turns out you were just some kind of maniac?”

“Desperate,” Wesker said. “So desperate to get away that I would go the one place I knew that they could never follow me.  I thought I was courageous, iconoclastic. But now I think I was merely a coward looking for a place to hide…”

He looked at Leon as if he was waiting for him to voice an opinion on the matter, even though it sounded like he already had his mind pretty well made up. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Leon admitted. “Courageous? Cowardly? I’m not even sure I know what abstract words like those mean anymore. They don’t seem to have any weight or substance compared to the things that are really real.”

“Such as?” Wesker said.

Leon swallowed dryly. He felt a terrible magnetism drawing him forward, but he wasn’t sure he had actually leaned in. Only they were a fraction closer now than they had been a moment ago, and Leon could not say for certain who had moved to bridge the gap, or if it alarmed him more that Wesker might have done it or that he might have done it himself.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, his voice hoarse. “I can’t think of anything right now. Give me a second and it’ll come to me.”

He supposed he had known for a while now that he was going to make a move. It had just been a matter of when he was going to give in and get on with it. Leon couldn’t really get a read on Wesker enough to tell whether or not a move was going to be welcome, but he didn’t think even an unwelcome one was going to be disastrous. For all his hard, metallic standoffishness, Wesker didn’t actually seem like the type to react badly.

In fact, he just waited, rigid and unmoving, as Leon closed the last of the gap between them and kissed him.

Wesker sat there and took it. Not exactly yielding to him, but not quite pulling away either. His lips parted a small degree, a distance so minute only sophisticated lab equipment ought to have been able to detect it. Leon felt the edges of Wesker’s teeth, and they seemed uncommonly sharp against his lower lip.

When Leon leaned back and broke contact, the first thing he noticed was that his mouth was tingling with a pins and needles sensation that tripped across his tongue and over his hard palate. He met Wesker’s eyes, but they were flat and unreadable. Nothing to see there. His lips had compressed into a noncommittal line, registering neither displeasure nor surprise.

“You sure like to make a guy put up a fight,” Leon said.

“Is there any other way to succeed?” Wesker replied.

Leon laughed a little. “You’re not going to ask why I did that?”

“I know why.”

“Ah,” Leon said. “Okay, then.” He wondered what Wesker was going to do about it. Wesker might have been three steps ahead of everyone, and good for him on that account. However, to Leon he was the same mysterious and unscaleable edifice he had been before Leon had – he assumed – made things weird.

Leon licked his lips. The pins-and-needles sensation had not abated, and it felt for the life of him like the whole works were about to erupt into blisters. He scrubbed his lips absently with the back of his hand. “You’re not contagious or anything, are you?”

This finally got a reaction out of Wesker. His severe expression tightened even further, his lips whitening where he pressed them together. “No,” he said. And then, “I don’t think so.”

“Damnit, Wesker…”

“Viral concentrations have always been low in saliva,” Wesker said, sounding almost defensive. “I tested the old T-Virus extensively.”

“How do you test something like that?” Leon said.

“I conducted field tests personally.”

That was one way of putting it, Leon thought. He wasn’t sure he liked the way Wesker talked about sleeping around, as if it were research he was performing into some esoteric facet of animal behavior. Though for all Leon knew, maybe he really had just been thinking of his doubtlessly substantial number of conquests as merely data points in the grand experiment he was conducting.

Wesker sniffed, as if offended. “You were the one who kissed me.”

“I’m a drunk with bad judgment.”

“That matter is not in dispute,” Wesker said. “I take issue with the fact that you choose now of all times to develop sober judgment.”

“Sorry,” Leon said. “I’m not usually like this. My judgment might not be great these days, but at least I usually follow through on things. You need to understand that this is weird for me, though.”

“That you are attracted to me,” Wesker said, sounding weary, like this a song and dance he had been through many times before.

“That I like talking to you,” Leon said.

It was the last thing Leon had expected would bring Wesker up short, but it did. Leon thought that he detected a hint of movement in his normally matte irises, as if they had briefly ceased to absorb all light and matter around them.

“I like talking to you too,” Wesker said at last. It seemed to come as a revelation, as if it were some inconvenient information that he had not considered before but was now forced to make fit into his rigid worldview.

Leon sighed. The tingling on his lips had pretty well calmed down by now. Between that and the odd flash of something nearly human that he had seen in Wesker’s eyes, he felt bold to touch him again. This time he started at the inner bend of Wesker’s elbow, and stroked slowly upward with the backs of his fingers, over the bulge of his upper arm and into the hollow of his shoulder.

“We should talk, then,” Leon said.

“About what?” Wesker inclined his head slightly, following Leon’s progress with his eyes. “I can’t think of a single thing to say.”

“You could do the Greek thing again.”

“ _Hos hoi g'amphiepon taphon Hektoros hippodamoio_ ,” Wesker said. He switched languages so smoothly and fluently that for a second Leon wasn’t sure what had actually happened. While he fumbled, Wesker reached up took Leon’s hand in his, guiding it around to the back of his neck.

“ _Hippo_ … that’s horse. Everyone knows that one,” Leon said. He moved his fingers in loose circles around the hard ridge Wesker’s vertebra formed under his skin.  “ ‘And so they buried Hector, breaker of horses’ ?” he guessed.

“More or less,” Wesker said. “Though your translation needs work.”

“Fucking snob,” Leon murmured as he leaned in. When he kissed him this time, Wesker actually kissed him back, which even now Leon had not expected. One of his arms went around the small of Leon’s back, where it rested, uncommonly solid and uncommonly light, until Wesker reclined on the sofa and drew Leon after him.

Lying down like that, Leon got an intoxicating, terrifying taste of just how powerfully built Wesker really was. He was almost a full head taller than Leon, and he was broader through the shoulders and chest. Even his waist, which had seemed so slim and tapered from a distance made Leon’s look downright dainty in comparison.

Wesker seemed to well understand his tremendous strength, though. Leon could feel him holding back when he touched him, keeping his power well in check. It must have been something he had learned when he was still young, after the first growth spurt shot him up, awkward and gangly, well past his peers and probably most of the adults he had known. He’d been keeping something back since the start, almost the exact opposite of Chris as Leon had known him. Chris, who, even after he had packed on 50 pounds of solid muscle, still slapped you on the back with his full strength, so hard it practically sent you headfirst into your beer.

Already out of his shirt, Wesker seemed pretty adamant that Leon should catch up. He insistently worked at the buttons of the too-big flannel Leon had found upstairs. When Leon kneeled back to slip it off, Wesker followed him, pressing both massive palms against Leon’s abdomen, sliding them upward, over his ribs. Leon shuddered as Wesker’s thumbs traced the groove between his pectoral muscles and his sculpted fingernails flicked past his nipples, up into the indentations under his collarbones.

“I don’t look anything like you,” Leon said, because he felt like someone ought to say something. But as soon as the words were out he felt fumbling and idiotic. He was just stating the obvious, something they both already knew.

At last, Wesker’s hands reached his shoulders, and he drew Leon down against him. He may not have been anything like Wesker, but Leon had still been the one to carry him out of that lab. He’d been strong enough for that, and it had to count for something. They both already knew that too.

Wesker kissed him once, fiercely, and then he said, “Here,” as he all but shoved Leon’s face into the crook of his neck.

Leon obligingly ran his tongue along the sensitive juncture between Wesker’s throat and shoulder, drawing out a kind of strangled gasp, as if he had been struck solidly in the stomach. Here was something they could both enjoy, and Leon knew that it was one thing for Wesker to rely on him when he absolutely needed it, but for him to ask for something just because he wanted it, that was quite the coup indeed.

While Leon nibbled at his neck, eventually working his way up to his earlobe, Wesker dug strong fingers into the small of his back, drawing Leon’s body against his in a mindless way driven only by the insatiable need to be closer.

Leon’s cock was already hard, and when it scraped against the sharp ridge of Wesker’s hip, it leapt to full and straining alertness.

“Fuck…” Leon muttered into the damp flesh of Wesker’s throat. He kept one hand fixed onto Wesker’s arm, as if it anchored them both in place, and he reached down with the other to fumble at the fly of his jeans. He managed to get them unbuttoned and hitched partway down without breaking contact, but when the time came to shuck them entirely, Leon had to untangle himself and sit back.

It wasn’t until then that he saw Wesker’s eyes, and they stopped him short.

His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks, and all around them his irises pulsed with crimson light. A second circle had formed around the red, a ragged black ring that radiated outward, swallowing up the whites of his eyes.

When he noticed that Leon was hesitating, Wesker rasped out an irritated, “What?” There was an edge to his voice, a desperate edge. Leon didn’t answer right away, and Wesker half-sat, bringing their faces near to each other. In close quarters, Leon could see that the ring of black was slowly spreading.

“What is it now?” Wesker said, a good deal more gently than before. He kissed the corner of Leon’s mouth as if to urge him along. “It’s not contagious. Not this way. I told you that.”

Leon shook his head. In fact, he had completely forgotten that, not five minutes ago, he had feared for his life. “Can’t you feel that?” he murmured, passing the pad of his thumb under the hollow of Wesker’s eye.

Wesker’s eyes narrowed; the red glow was faintly visible through his lids. “I can feel this,” Wesker said huskily, and wrapped one of his elegant, long-fingered hands around Leon’s cock.

Leon’s pulse went into his throat. His erection had started to flag a little, all the wind taken out of its sails by Wesker’s creepy eyes, but as soon as Wesker touched him it sprang back to full and rigid hardness.

“Fine,” Leon said, as Wesker stroked him. “We’ll do it your way.”

Wesker drew him back down, turning them as they went. His strength was phenomenal, and now that he had his mind set on something Leon had nothing to do but follow along with it. Wesker rolled him onto his back and crawled over him. Leon had found him intimidating before, but it had nothing on the sweet terror of having Wesker’s powerful mass coiled above him, almost blocking out the light.

“Undress me,” Wesker said against Leon’s aching lips, and it was all Leon could do to keep from coming right there. He unbuttoned Wesker’s jeans and raked the zipper down. Wesker wasn’t wearing underwear, which honestly didn’t surprise Leon in the slightest.

His cock was a sturdy weight, and it seemed to have more mass and heft to it than the rest of Wesker’s hollow, bird-light limbs. A good deal of liquid had collected at the tip of it, and when Leon worked it free of Wesker’s jeans a few drops of moisture landed on his stomach.

Wesker leaned over him, crushing Leon down into the sofa so that the cushions sagged and the springs protested. His eyes had been completely eclipsed now by those alternating rings of black and red, without even a hint of white around the periphery. Leon’s stomach knotted in protest of it, and then twisted in a different way when Wesker pressed down on him, grinding his thigh against Leon’s aching cock, rubbing their bodies together.

Leon’s lips fumbled along his smooth cheek until he found Wesker’s lips, and he kissed him fiercely, feeling Wesker’s teeth cut into his mouth. Leon could taste metal, not like blood, but like the way lightning might taste.

With Wesker taking the lead, things moved efficiently, without a moment’s hesitation or a single misstep. He wrapped one of his hands around both their cocks, working them in tandem. Occasionally he loosened his grip so that Leon’s erection skated along the fleshy part of his thigh or the edge of his hipbone.

Leon didn’t last long. He’d never stood a chance.

He came hard, groaning in relief against Wesker’s lips. And Wesker, it turned out, still had one more surprise left in him. He came too, just a second later, hard on Leon’s heels, as if he had been holding back just out of the fear of seeming desperate. 

Leon supposed he had looked desperate enough for both of them. No sense pretending otherwise now. He tilted his chin back and dusted a quick, dry kiss over Wesker’s lips.

“I think I threw out my back,” he admitted shakily. “I’m getting old.”

“You should keep still, then.”

“Thanks, doctor.”

Wesker raised himself on his hands and looked down at him. To Leon’s intense relief, the concentric circles of red and black had faded from his eyes now that the excitement was over. His irises were back to that familiar muddy purple hue; strange, unsettling, but nothing Leon couldn’t deal with. But as he watched, the bruise color faded around the edges, growing indistinct, and then it split like clouds after a storm, yielding in spots and slashes to blue.

Leon’s expression softened. He reached up to touch Wesker’s cheek. “You were good.”

Wesker tilted his head curiously to one side, bringing more of his jaw into contact with Leon’s hand. “I think I am getting old too,” he said at last.

He turned on his side and lay down on the couch. It was a pretty tight fit, but when Leon spooned up against Wesker’s turned back, it just about worked.

“Is that absolutely necessary?” Wesker said as Leon slung an arm around his midsection and curled close.

“Yes,” Leon replied.

“Hmph,” Wesker said. But he left it at that.

After that, he didn’t say much else. Leon figured he was pushing his luck quite a bit as it was, so he got quiet too. Wesker’s breathing was steady and deep, but Leon didn’t think he was sleeping. He kept perfectly still, as if lying dormant or waiting to strike.

Leon wondered about that glimpse of human blue that had surfaced for a moment in Wesker’s eyes as his pulse wound down and he started to feel calm. He half thought he had imagined it.


	17. Chapter 17

Sherry knew that they were getting close to their destination because Manuela unzipped her pack and retrieved her phone. Without a word, she held out her hand and Sherry turned her own device over.

“Let’s get you briefed,” Manuela said, and established a connection so she could send Sherry some files.

Sherry paged through the satellite photos. She’d been worried that desk work had made her lax and rusty, but she could feel her mental training kicking in, filing the layout of the place away in her mind so that she would be able to recall it again in an instant, no matter how chaotic or improvisational things got.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Manuela said. “I contacted Ada first. This mission was my idea.”

Sherry glanced up at her, wondering if she was supposed to act impressed. In truth, she was only annoyed that Manuela had waited until now – after handing over the data and expecting Sherry to make use of it – to break her enigmatic and pensive silence. Sherry knew that she herself would have never displayed such unprofessionalism, and she judged it harshly in others. Manuela wanted her to think that she was the voice of experience on this little field trip, but in fact she was as green as they came.

A sudden and intense longing pierced Sherry’s breast. She wished that Jake were here, for no other reason than that she could be sure they would work well together. Though it had been important to him to keep up the illusion that he was sloppy, careless, more lucky than skilled, Sherry had seen in an instant that Jake was a consummate professional.

It had taken her a long time to realize her feelings for him, so long that when she finally did recognize them for what they were, they were already fully formed. It was as if that tender affection had been growing inside her all along, under her radar or outside the scope of her perceptions, until she could ignore it no longer.

Sherry felt that something similar was happening now, had been happening ever since Jake had unearthed the corpse of Albert Wesker and started poking around among the bones. Even now, she could not say what had changed, though she was prepared for another violent realization, as when her life had suddenly shifted course to revolve around the new knowledge that she loved Jake.

She knew she had to be ready for anything, which was why she had left like she did, without telling him where she was going. Jake would worry, of course, but he was levelheaded and used to things working out for the best for him, so he wouldn’t panic. It might not even occur to him that Sherry wasn’t coming back, a thought which Sherry herself had been forced to entertain more than once.

Manuela had not spoken again, though she was still looking at Sherry primly and expectantly, waiting for her to speak.

“Why?” Sherry said, in the absence of anything better. “The Umbrella satellite network is just work for me, and dull work at that. Housekeeping. I don’t see how it can be of much interest to you, or Ada Wong. Or whoever’s funding you, for that matter.”

“My reasons are personal,” Manuela said. She spoke easily now; she’d just been waiting for Sherry to ask the right question. “We’re both carriers of T-virus variants, but you were infected in Raccoon City, by one of the original strains, so familiar even a first year medical student could synthesize them. No one is even afraid of them anymore. They are quaint diseases, something from the past, like smallpox.”

Sherry frowned. She certainly wouldn’t have put it that way.

“T-Veronica is still all but a mystery in the literature,” Manuela went on. “An evolutionary dead end, the jetsam of capitalism. Not even worth the effort of moving on the black market.”

“How did you end up with it?” Sherry asked.

“My father had money, and connections, but he lacked the sense to know exactly what he was getting. He was accustomed to having his own way, as men with money are, and he saw no reason to take into consideration what anyone else felt about the matter.”

Manuela frowned slightly. She seemed to wish that she could be speaking to some past version of herself rather than to Sherry, so that she might clear the whole unpleasant matter up with a volley of ironclad logic.

“For a long time after I found out, I thought I wanted to die,” Manuela admitted. “I know now that if I had really put my mind to it, there would have been many ways to make that happen, even for one infected with the T-virus. Death was not what I really longed for, but only for a suitable way to apologize for what I’d had thrust upon me without my consent. My father had caused a lot of trouble for everyone, and I thought that by causing none for anyone, I might somehow balance his books for him.”

Sherry had no idea what to say to any of this, and she was embarrassed. “It took me a long time to come to terms with it too,” she tried, knowing that it wasn’t enough.

“I was a very well-behaved girl,” Manuela said. “It took me many difficult years to realize that it wasn’t my responsibility to clean up after all the selfish and stupid men in my life.”

Manuela leaned forward, across the gap between their seats. She grabbed the glove on her right hand and jerked it off violently. Her hand and wrist were heavily scarred in alternating blotches of raw red and puckered white, giving the illusion that the skin had been badly patched. Though there was no doubt she had expected Sherry to recoil, Sherry instead leaned forward to get a closer look at the too-clean delineations between burns and wounds. She had seen much worse than this before.

“I’m not ashamed of who I am,” Manuela said stiffly. As if to prove that, she pushed up the sleeve of her parka, showing Sherry that the scars extended up her forearm. “I’ve lived this long with the virus, with it a part of me.” She paused, seeming to consider her words very carefully. “Of course, I don’t mean that to be melodramatic, or as a rhetorical flourish. I was speaking purely in genetic terms.”

“I understood you,” Sherry said. For the first time she wondered what she was doing here, and she was shocked and ashamed that she hadn’t considered it before. She had uprooted her entire life. No one knew she was here, save this stranger who Sherry could say nothing about except that she was infected with the T-virus and rapidly working herself up into the kind of pitch that had been known to trigger viral mutations.

Manuela might have been capable of anything. She had Ada Wong to vouch for her, but who was Ada but another link in the great chain that kept Sherry yoked to the ruins of Raccoon City. Ada wasn’t even here now. She’d made a great show of keeping a watchful and benevolent eye on their operation, but in actuality the thought of going out to the middle of the tundra with questionable company probably bored her stiff.

Though she was well aware of all she had accomplished and endured, Sherry was still accustomed to thinking of herself as a girl, someone who needed to defer to the voice of experience. Part of it was that taking orders was easy and finding her own way was hard, but there was more to it than that. She, too, had been, as Manuela had said, a very well-behaved girl.

“I knew you would,” Manuela said. “You were the only one who could understand, and I knew that you would be willing as well as able. There are so many self-righteous people out there. They think they can comprehend the virus, and what it does to a body.”

Manuela turned to look out the window. Sherry doubted she could see much; the glass was completely frosted over.

She continued, “After what happened in China, they tested the survivors. There were 2500 people from Lianshang alone with a detectable viral load. They’re all in quarantine now, you know. Shipped off to some island off the coast like a leper colony. They tried to keep it quiet, but people will always find out.”

“I heard that too,” Sherry said. “But it’s only a temporary measure. The government just wants to be sure there’s no chance of the virus spreading again.”

“You’re naïve if you believe that,” Manuela said without any heat behind it. “Or worse, you are complacent. You believe what you have been told because it comforts you to think that everything will work out for the best, that the government you serve has your best interests at heart.”

Sherry didn’t try to protest. She knew it would give Manuela too much pleasure to see her stammer through a denial. Instead, she told her, “If you’d seen what I have, you’d take comfort where you could get it.”

“The only reason the United States government hasn’t enacted similar measures is because they haven’t been able to make screening for the T-virus mandatory. They’re so bogged down in bureaucracy and in-fighting that they can’t even manage that.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sherry said instantly. “Something like that could never happen here.”

“The United States, which has used nuclear weapons against its own cities? You don’t believe it could happen? Or you just had never considered it before?” Manuela ran her whole hand over the ruined one briefly, tracing the deep grooves carved into her skin. “Because you can allude to the things that you have seen all you want, but I can tell that overall you live a very comfortable and uncontentious life. I knew it at a glance.”

Sherry was more irritated than angry, but she stomped the feelings down regardless. “Since you know so much about me, then I guess you know that my personal life has never interfered with my work.”

“You say that as if it were something to be proud of.”

Before Sherry had a chance to respond, the plane dropped abruptly and her stomach leapt into her throat. The pilot called back to them that they were descending, a moment too late to spare them the worst of the discomfort, and then he tipped the nose of the plane down at such a sharp angle that both Sherry and Manuela were left scrambling after their trailing seatbelts.

Sherry cleaned the condensation off the window and looked out, but she couldn’t see anything below her save a featureless snowfield, without so much as a tree to give the illusion of hospitability. The pilot brought their plane down in concentric spirals, each pass a little tighter than the last as they approached the ground. Though the descent was rough, when he actually touched down, Sherry didn’t even realize it at first, the landing was so soft.

He opened the door and dropped the stairs for them so Sherry and Manuela could climb out. As she passed from the stuffy interior of the plan and into the crisp and frozen air of the sub-Arctic, Sherry felt the cold fill her lungs. She heard a soft crackling sound as her hair froze into stiff ropes around her face.

All at once and with no preface at all, she wondered where Jake was right now. Some quick mental math cleared that matter up, when she realized it was the middle of the night back in Washington. He was probably fast asleep, warm and comfortable the way someone could only be when they hadn’t been travelling for the past three days straight.

If he had been awake, he might have been wondering about her as well. But he never could have guessed where she was or what she was doing, not in a million years. Sherry felt a little thrill of satisfaction at that.

Manuela shouldered her pack and started off, moving light and swift across the snow. Sherry had to scramble to catch up to her, but when she did she could see that Manuela’s hands were shoved deep into the pockets of her parka and she was hunched inside the hood.

“I don’t do well with cold,” she said tersely, and then immediately clamped her lips shut and set her jaw to keep her teeth from chattering.

From behind them came the sound of an engine, and Sherry turned just in time to see their plane lift off, making ever-widening circles as it left them behind.

“He is going to refuel,” Manuela said. “We arranged it.”

“Is that safe?” Sherry asked. “We’re alone out here.”

“We’ll manage well enough,” Manuela said dryly. “He was hired to transport us, not to protect us from calamities. I had assumed you were qualified to handle those.”

Manuela put her head down into the wind and started to walk. Sherry watched the plane disappear into the low cloud cover and then she turned to follow. Just over the first ridge of snow past the landing strip, Sherry realized she was wading through coils of barbed wire sunk in the drifts. The spines were badly rusted from age and exposure, and Sherry picked her way carefully. Manuela, though she must have noticed the wire took no such cares, and after they had passed the first line of long-buried fences, Sherry had to run to catch up to her.

Beyond the barbed wire, a row of corrugated steel structures, like airplane hangars, sat decaying on the naked ice. They were half-buried in drifts of snow, but as Sherry approached them she could make out the faded red and white Umbrella logo stenciled on the side.

Manuela paused in front of the largest building. The top of the exterior hatch was just visible above the drift but there was no way to access it without going through a foot of snow.

When she came up next to her, Sherry could see that Manuela was shivering inside her parka. The skin of her face was blue where it peeked out above her scarf.

“Are you okay?” Sherry said. It was chilly out here, but probably not much below zero. Whatever was happening to Manuela was far beyond a normal reaction to the cold. “Should I try to make a fire for you?”

“No,” Manuela replied. Her lips were numb, making her voice sound thick. “I’ll be fine once we get inside.”

She fumbled with the heavy glove on her right hand, jerking it off and dropping it into the snow. The red slashes that crossed her flesh were livid and swollen, giving the impression that they might burst at any moment.

“Stand back,” Manuela said. Her teeth were gritted. She fumbled with the zipper of her parka but her frozen fingers weren’t up to the task. The flesh on the back of her hand split open, and a few drops of blood fell to ground. Where they landed, the snow hissed and steamed as if it had been struck by hot embers.

Giving up on the parka, Manuela shook out her right arm. The burn scars bubbled and blistered as if they were being exposed to fire all over again. The air around her hand began to shimmer, a desert mirage in the middle of the tundra.

Sherry backed off a step. She only had her knife on her, and even that was buried in her pack. By the time she got it out, whatever was going to happen would already be over. She could only look on as a tongue of flame snaked up from within one of the cracks in Manuela’s flesh. It flickered once, bravely, before the wind battered it into non-existence.

Then the fire was back, not from a single flame that had burst from beneath her skin, but on the skin itself. It quickly burned the sleeve of her parka, melting the synthetic fabric into a molten neon-colored slime that Manuela seemed to not feel at all though it stuck to her arm in patches. The smell was awful, like melted plastic and burned meat.

Manuela turned her palm upright, cupping her hand, and beads of flammable blood rolled like quicksilver towards its center to pool. When enough had collected, Manuela lobbed the flaming ball underhand at the door of the facility. A shower of sparks erupted where it hit the snow, and the blood kept burning, as if it made its own fuel. It melted the snow drift so quickly that water rushed back over Sherry’s boots, soaking them to the ankle.

A couple of the scars on Manuela’s arm were still bleeding in slow trickles, and they threw magnesium white flashes into the cold air. She picked at the remains of her parka, pulling charred fibers out of her skin. It didn’t seem to her hurt her in the slightest. In fact, she looked much better than she had a moment ago; her cheeks were rosy and pink, as if warmed from within by a private furnace.

When Manuela turned back to her, Sherry tried to conceal her horror, though she knew she wasn’t doing a very capable job of it. She’d heard what the T-Veronica virus could do, but Sherry had never seen it in action. It seemed to her now repulsive and magnificent in equal measures.

“Are you ready?” Manuela said. Without waiting for an answer, she tried the hatch. It opened easily for her.

They stepped into a carpeted hallway with a couple of dusty corporate art prints hanging on the walls. It was cozy, almost. Inside the facility was no warmer than without, but it was a relief to be out of the wind.

“They would have put the server room along the exterior wall,” Sherry offered, feeling as if she had very little to contribute and that she ought to do something. “Where it would it would be cooler.”

“That seems reasonable,” Manuela replied. Her arm was still smoldering, and Sherry found it disconcerting. She wished Manuela would do something to cover up the scars at least. They were a constant reminder of what the T-virus could do to a body, which stirred up unpleasant memories, things Sherry had not thought of in years. Things she had thought she’d forgotten.

“Let’s split up,” she said abruptly. “We’ll find it faster that way.”

Manuela nodded, acquiescing easily. Sherry was surprised; she hadn’t thought she would actually agree. She took the west wing of the facility, which left Sherry with the east. Before she got down to business, she unshouldered her pack and retrieved her knife from underneath the clothes and first aid supplies.

It was a utilitarian outdoors knife, the kind with the blade that folded out. It was only about six inches long, such that she’d had to stash it in a checked bag when she flew, but not intimidating enough to send anyone fleeing in terror. All the same, Sherry felt better once she had it tucked safely in the pocket of her parka.

She started working her way methodically through the rooms on her side of the facility. It was clear that this place had been used for some pretty heavy biological research. Sherry came across a huge kennel, packed with empty animal crates. The specimens were gone, but the place hadn’t been cleaned before the researchers packed it in, and Sherry was glad that the cold masked most of the smell.

Sherry considered getting on the radio and calling Manuela to warn her, but it seemed like Manuela already knew quite a bit about this place. Sherry didn’t want to be too hard on her about it, though. She’d held a lot back herself. Sherry had not forgotten that she was keeping secrets even now.

In spite of that, Sherry still thought that Manuela meant well. She was pushing the whole strident activist thing a little too far, but a lot of what she had said was true. It wasn’t her fault that her ideals didn’t have much of a home in the cold, compromising, unglamorous world of fieldwork.

Maybe she was just green. Sherry knew all too well that people had blindspots and shortcomings that you would never expect from looking at them. For all Manuela had talked, Sherry actually had no idea where she came from, or how she had gotten infected in the first place. She’d blamed her father, but she hadn’t gone into detail. Maybe she didn’t have to. Sherry, after all, knew all too well the circumstances behind her own exposure to the virus.

She found the server room at the bottom of a flight of stairs that led to a bunker under the permafrost. It seemed like as good a place as any to start. Aside from a layer of dust, the room looked much as it must have when the base had been abandoned. When Sherry turned on the power, the equipment hummed stoically to life. A loud banging started up in one of the ducts, but it was the only complaint the machinery made.

You had to hand it to Umbrella: its infrastructure had been built with a long game in mind. Sherry remembered reading an article online somewhere about how the Umbrella Corporation had been decades ahead of anyone else in terms of sustainable energy. They had been using solar and geothermal power exclusively at most of their facilities as early as the 1970s. The oil and gas companies had pitched fit about it, naturally, but Umbrella had been big enough at its height that there hadn’t been much they could do about it.

It must have taken thousands of people to pull off something like that, all of them pouring their labor into some noble goal that would benefit an institution that saw them only as test subjects and capital when it took notice of them at all. Sherry wondered what it must have been like, whether they tried to justify it to themselves, or whether they just put their heads down and earned their paychecks in complacency.

You couldn’t fault anyone for that, not in a world like this one. Even before everything had gone to hell after Raccoon City, trying to make a halfway stable life for yourself in America had been too chancy, too uncertain, to let things like conscience get in the way. If anyone had ever raised objections to what they were doing, Sherry supposed there had been countless others who could do the same job very nearly as well, and a good deal more quietly. Maybe they hadn’t been the best engineers, but they had been the smartest ones.

She found a terminal in the back of the server room. When she cleaned the frost off the monitor, she saw that it was switched on and some green text on a black background informed her it was awaiting a login.

There was something that struck her as a little cartoonish about the retro technology. Surely it had once been cutting edge, but now it looked like something out of a low budget movie from the 80’s.

The security on the terminal was just as antiquated. Sherry unlocked her phone and accessed some of the NSA documents she had borrowed before she’d left the office. She opened up a file of login and password combinations that they had managed to retrieve from salvaged Umbrella personnel files. The third pair she put in worked. A series of DOS command lines scrolled across the screen.

Above Sherry’s head, the banging in the ducts continued. Occasionally it shifted, as if more than one panel up there were damaged. A horrible smell began to circulate through the room. At first, Sherry tried to pass it off as the musty odor endemic to old buildings, but it persisted, becoming more intense the longer the power was on. Sherry pulled her scarf up over her nose. It helped a little, but she could still smell it. It was like putrid oil coating the inside of her nostrils, leaking down the back of her throat.

It reminded her of something from her childhood, a hot summer when a pigeon had gotten trapped in the walls of her parent’s sensible planned home in the suburbs of Raccoon City. The bird had died, and rotted, and the stench had gotten so bad they’d had to call someone in to tear down an entire wall and fish the corpse out.

The same death-smell was quickly flooding the server room now. Something was rotting up there in the ducts; it was impossible to mistake for anything else.

Sherry didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to last in here without taking a break to catch her breath. She wiped her eyes, which had started to water, and sent a message to Manuela. Once Sherry knew she was on the way, she turned her attention back to the computer terminal.

After she’d been assigned to the task force in charge of gaining access to the old satellite network, Sherry had attended a bunch of seminars on working with ancient DOS interfaces like these. In many ways, this antiquated technology was more difficult than the cutting edge stuff. It was notoriously temperamental, not to mention non-standard even between computers in the same facility.

It took a few tries to navigate through the labyrinthine menus, but eventually she started to feel like she was making progress. She’d almost gotten used to the smell, but the knocking in the ducts above her was still distracting. It came at random intervals, sometimes a single loud bang directly above her head, sometimes a flurry of smaller taps from somewhere deep in the server room. Every time it happened, her shoulders ratcheted up tighter, and Sherry had to redouble her efforts to stay focused on the job.

Eventually, she found a folder that looked promising. The stench had become almost intolerable as the room heated up. Sherry’s skin crawled, as if the death-smell had become a film or fungus that was slowly coating it. Manuela would arrive at any moment, but Sherry wanted to make as much headway as she could before that. She had been working towards this for months now, and she wanted to do as much on her own as possible. Maybe it would be enough to justify the long hours she had spent away from home, away from Jake. Maybe it would excuse the way she had run out on him…

After a few false starts, she managed to get a connection established with the satellite network. She shuffled through a few of the folders to make sure it was the real deal, and then set the whole directory to transfer to her phone. There was doubtlessly a lot of junk in there, but she could sort it out later.

As she scrolled through the files on the console, her father’s name suddenly jumped out at her. She wished she hadn’t seen it, but there was no use now pretending that was the case. Sherry scrolled back up to the folder, which was labeled “W Initiative.” William Birkin was listed as the only person with permission to access it.

Sherry tried opening the folder, but it was password protected. On a whim, she tried her own name, and got an error message. Then she tried her mother’s name, which netted her a similar result. Finally, in a fit of annoyance and disgust, she tried “IdlewildSouth,” which had been her dad’s favorite Allman Brothers album.

That finally got her somewhere. The folder was full of automatically generated reports, but there were a few lab notes in there too. She opened one up, and started to read it. The style was unmistakably her father’s: dry, dithering, occasionally misspelled. Sherry couldn’t understand all the references, but she got the gist of it.

William Birkin had been hand-selected to work on the project. Not even the other people in his lab had known. As near as Sherry could gather, he’d been synthesizing a universal T-virus vaccine. No, not just that. A cure for the virus, one that would work even in the latent phase.

Sherry’s stomach twisted itself into knots. To think that something like this had been here all along. All through the horrors of Raccoon City, Tall Oaks, Terragrigia, Lianshang. If she had come sooner, been smarter, worked more efficiently. If she hadn’t written off her father’s legacy as too painful to engage with, perhaps all of those tragedies could have been prevented.

Desperate now, Sherry opened the final page of notes. It had been uploaded only a few days before her father’s death. They had conducted laboratory tests in dogs and monkeys and completely halted the effects of the virus, knit up torn flesh, restarted the bodily systems that had ground almost to a standstill. The animals exhibited higher than normal anxiety, and they were ravenously hungry, but they showed no abnormal signs of aggression, and some of the fresher mutations had even begun to reverse themselves.

But according to the document, the W Initiative could not survive long outside of laboratory conditions. It had to be administered within minutes of breaking the sterile seal on the culture. At three minutes of exposure to air, its effectiveness was reduced by 50 percent. At ten minutes, it no longer worked at all.

The end of the document read:

_Acquire more raw genetic material from the subject. Hair is sufficient when blood is unavailable. Have not yet been able to get permission to take a living tissue sample. He suspects something is going on, but is not afraid. He’s only anxious that he has been left out of something important._

There was no further reference to the human test subject in the notes; he was not mentioned by name. But Sherry knew his name, and even thinking it was like a sliver of ice working its way slowly into her heart.

It seemed impossible that this had been her father’s work, that he was speaking to her now, an unquiet ghost, giving up all his secrets from the cold keep of death. Sherry grabbed for her phone. The download of the data from the satellite wasn’t finished, but she didn’t care. She needed very badly to talk to Jake, to tell him everything. It wasn’t just for her own sake. With this data, they could both be cured. They could both be clean and whole again.

She never got a chance to dial. At that moment, a final thump came from the ducts above her head, and then the clatter of a crumpling panel. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something dark and shapeless fall to the ground. Then, from behind a bank of servers, the wet slap of flesh shuddering over the concrete floor.

A fresh wave of the death-smell washed over her, making tears squeeze out of her eyes. Sherry was driven back as if by a physical force. The phone slipped from her hand as she reached up to tear the scarf away from her face so she could vomit.

The bile burned coming up. Even after she had everything out, her shoulders continued to heave, but her body could not expel the taint. Wiping the tears from her eyes before they froze, Sherry finally managed to straighten up. The creature came around the corner of the servers.

It was one of the early-model Hunters, squat and mottled with a hunched back and an uneven slash of teeth in its face. The creature was bone thin, its ribs protruding like piano keys from its sides. Both its legs were black with frostbite, one all the way to the knee. As it gingerly placed its weight on that side, Sherry realized that under the taut and shiny black skin, the Hunter’s flesh was rotted through.

The creature fixed its dull eyes on her. It opened its mouth, but the only sound it managed to make was an exhausted whisper.

It still moved fast, though. When it sprang at her, Sherry barely managed to duck out of the way. The Hunter’s claw skated along her back, ripping through her parka, cutting into her shoulder. For a terrible moment, it seemed like it would pull her back, but then Sherry found her balance and tore away, leaving a good piece of flesh behind in the process.

In less than a second, the entire right side of her body was soaked with gore. Sherry’s head swam as her blood pressure dropped, and her legs threatened to go out from under her. Slipping in her own blood, she staggered a few steps, then got them moving again. Her shoulder was already healing up; she could feel it itching as it knitted itself back together.

The Hunter had been slow to get its bearings as well, which had undoubtedly saved her. When Sherry turned to face it, her knife now out and in her hand, the creature was only beginning to ready itself for another strike.

It sprung forward again. This time she was ready and she gave a step, shrinking back and then immediately pistoning her arm forward like a spring unleashing its kinetic energy. She caught the Hunter under the ribs with the tip of the knife, and she pushed it in hard, all the way to the hilt. Sherry knew that she had punctured its lung, because it let out a great cloud of rotten breath.

Sherry tried to pull the knife free, but it caught on a ridge of bone inside the creature’s body. The hilt was slick with blood, and Sherry’s hand slipped off. Before she could take hold of it again, the Hunter raked its claws at her.

She leapt back. Her foot caught on the edge of a shelf of servers and she tripped. There was no time to right herself. The Hunter faltered on its bad leg and its shoulder collided with the shelf, sending it toppling over.

Sherry hit the floor on her stomach, and shelf crashed into the wall above her at an angle, leaving a gap just wide enough that she wasn’t crushed.

Loose equipment rained down on her. The Hunter caught her in the calf, shredding her skin. Sherry kicked free, leaving her boot behind, and she began to crawl on her stomach towards the other end of the shelf.

The creature’s breath sounded wet, choked, panicky. She knew that she had dealt it a mortal blow, but that it still had a little life left in it. There was a good chance it would live long enough to kill her.

As she dragged herself towards the relatively open space at the other end of the shelf, she heard the Hunter’s ragged breath keeping pace with her. It was momentarily confused by the situation, but Hunters had been bred to be problem solvers. It would find her soon, and it would tear her free of the tunnel with its claws, or else bring the shelf down on her and crush her.

She hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell Jake about what she had found. To tell him that she was sorry. There was no more time now, no more chances to get things right.


	18. Chapter 18

All the literature on Hunters categorized them as ambush predators that were at their most dangerous when they had plenty of cover. It was an instinct culled from the lungfish DNA that made up part of the creature’s engineered genome and, no matter that it was injured and starving, this Hunter would probably not deviate much from that pattern. The preferred method of engagement for Hunters was to lure them into an open area, or a hallway where they would not be able to make use of the stalk-and-wait method.

Sherry could recall the page of her old field agent manual with that information on it very clearly, almost as if it swam in the air before her eyes. The door that led out into the hallway was a 10 meter sprint from the end of the crawlspace made by the collapsed shelf. She knew what she had to do, and she hiked herself up on her elbows and crawled on her belly toward the break at the end of the tunnel.

She pushed herself out into the open and scrambled to her feet. Her heel hit a patch of ice, slipped, would have fallen if, at that moment, a hand hadn’t closed around her upper arm and pulled her upright with compelling strength.

“Stop,” said Manuela. She made sure Sherry was steady, and then thrust her aside as if she were crowding her. The Hunter had halted a few feet away and was watching them with its milky eyes, both clawed hands lax at its sides. Sherry’s knife still jutted from beneath its ribcage, but there wasn’t much blood coming from the wound.

Manuela stepped forward without hesitation. The Hunter’s gaze swung to her, then, reluctantly, back to Sherry. It bared its yellowish teeth.

Sherry grabbed Manuela’s arm, pulling her back before she could get within range of the creature’s claws.

Manuela shrugged her off. “I’ve got it taken care of.”  

She stepped again, moving steadily, neither hurrying nor hesitating. There was no fear at all in her manner, not even as she reached out and touched the creature’s bulbous and misshapen brow.

The Hunter whimpered, an animal in pain.

“I know,” Manuela said quietly. “You’ve been alone out here for a long time. You’ve fought hard.”

She stroked the fingers of her scarred hand over the Hunter’s shoulder, down its slatted side towards the knife that jutted from its abdomen. Sherry could see that the burns were red, livid, as if they were lit by some private fire within. The Hunter shook its head back and forth a few times, but made no move to attack. It kept its teeth and claws sheathed.

“Don’t look,” said Manuela, and Sherry got the impression that she was not talking to her. The Hunter lowered its head, baring its thick neck, knotted with muscle. Manuela jerked the knife out of the creature’s side in a single quick movement. A gout of blood leapt from the wound, and the Hunter gave a short barking cry.

It jerked back, but Manuela moved more quickly still. She raised the knife about her head, and then brought it down hard, piercing the base of the Hunter’s skull.

The creature dropped at her feet. It let out a single breath, like a sigh, and then didn’t move again.

Manuela released her breath in a sharp exhalation, as if she had been holding it for a long time. She tossed the knife aside; Sherry flinched when she heard it clang off a metal shelf in one of the dark corners of the room. It seemed for a moment that she might collapse, and Sherry came forward so as to catch her if she did.

“I’m all right,” Manuela said quietly. “I just felt dizzy for a moment.”

Sherry was at a loss as to what to do next. “I didn’t know that T-Veronica—“

“It doesn’t,” Manuela said. “That was a personal talent of mine.”

“You were controlling it,” Sherry said. But she knew that wasn’t quite right, and she didn’t want to leave it at that. She tried again. “Or you could communicate with it. Or was it that it just wouldn’t attack you?”

“It knew that I would put an end to its suffering,” Manuela replied. She turned abruptly, pulling back her shoulders so that her entire countenance straightened out. “What about the data?”

Sherry had all but forgotten, but as soon as Manuela mentioned their mission, everything she had found came flooding back. For an instant, she thought that she might tell Manuela everything, about the cure that had nearly been, the universal vaccine, just so she wouldn’t have to be the only one who knew. The whispers of her intuition held her back. She couldn’t say what, but something made her play it close to the chest.

“I think I found something,” she said. “It’ll require closer analysis, of course.”

“Naturally,” Manuela replied. “I would expect nothing else.”

Sherry knew roughly where her phone had fallen when the Hunter had attacked her, and she went to look for it now. When she returned, she saw that Manuela had found a length of plastic tarp and spread it over the creature’s body. She tucked the corners in neatly around the already-stiffening corpse. The smell hardly seemed to bother her at all.

“This animal was raised in a cage. It knew nothing of the outside world. Then one day the cage was removed, and it found that outside was harsher and more terrible than it could ever imagine.”

Sherry slipped her phone into her pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.

“I don’t know if it helps,” she said, “but they’re engineered to not feel pain. Not like we feel it at any rate.”

Manuela didn’t respond. She was gazing down at the covered body, deep in thought. Sherry shifted on her feet. “We should see if the pilot is on his way back.”

“He’s not coming back,” Manuel said.

“Excuse me?”

“Not tonight. He radioed me that the plane needs repairs.”

Sherry’s stomach turned over. “What are we supposed to do?”

“Stay here,” Manuela said. “Just for the night. He will be back tomorrow morning.”

“What if there are more BOWs around?”

“There aren’t,” Manuela replied. “This was the last one.”

At last, she tore her eyes away and looked at Sherry. “You don’t seem pleased about this.”

“It’s a surprise.”

“And you don’t care for surprises.” Manuela shook her head. “I hardly blame you.”

***

They got settled for the night in one of the old barracks in the facility. Manuela opened her pack and pulled out a jar of peanut butter and a rather squashed loaf of bread. She made a stack of five sandwiches, then handed the leftovers to Sherry, who was more than a little embarrassed that her own bag was all but empty now that she had changed out of her bloody clothes and into her spare set.

Manuela began to make her way methodically through the sandwiches. “I’ve burned over 3000 calories today by my estimation. The hemoglobin mutation is hard on the body.”

“I never would have known. You handle it well.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Sherry said.

“What about your shoulder, I mean.”

Sherry reached back, touching the spot just outside her shoulder blade where the Hunter had raked her with its clause. It was still sore to the touch, as if she had been badly sunburned, but she could tell that there was no permanent damage. The gash on her calf hadn’t been as deep, and she could no longer feel that one at all.

“I got lucky,” she said with a shrug.

“I had heard you were an asymptomatic carrier,” Manuela said. “I see that is not exactly the case.”

Just like that, they were back on Manuela’s favorite topic of conversation. If she had her way, she’d probably sit up all night with Sherry gazing into their viral navels together. “I don’t exactly advertise it,” Sherry replied. “I might heal up fast, but it still hurts when something happens. It hurts me just like it would anyone else.”

Manuela nodded. “I’ve often thought that the true trauma of physical pain lies not in the sensation itself, but in the fear of it.”

“Maybe,” Sherry said. “But it doesn’t matter. We got what we came for, and it was worth a little pain.”

“Earlier, you dismissed it as nothing of interest. Housekeeping, I think you called it.”

Sherry wanted to say that things had changed a lot since then, but something held her back. There was a selfish, irrational part of her that didn’t want Manuela to know what she had found. This woman was a stranger to her, a chilly unwelcoming one at that, and it seemed unfair that she should know before Jake did, before all the people she loved.

She realized that she was being ridiculous. “I found something,” she admitted. Manuela was watching her with a sharpness that was unnerving. “Something that I think might be a big deal.”

“Ah,” Manuela said. “So the W Initiative is real.”

Sherry didn’t know what her expression looked like, but Manuela didn’t seem to like it. She rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t give me that crestfallen look. It’s not as if I kept it from you deliberately. In truth, I hardly believed such a thing was possible, but when Ada mentioned it I knew I had to find out for sure.”

“Ada knew all along?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by all along. She said she had heard rumors for a while. Such a wild and colorful group of associates she has. Still, I didn’t believe. I take it I should have, though.”

“It’s real,” Sherry admitted. “But incomplete. They almost had it, though. A universal cure for any pathogen with the T-virus protein.”

“Then they made more progress than even Ada suspected.” Manuela’s lips twisted into a sullen pout, and all at once transformed into a wealthy young girl who was used to getting her way and had been suddenly denied it.

“With the research that’s here, they could finish it,” Sherry said. “Aren’t you excited? Relieved?”

“Should I be?” Manuela snapped. “I don’t consider what I have to be a disease. I don’t need to be cured. I’m sure you weren’t eager for a vaccine either, when that animal was cutting you to ribbons.”

“After everything that’s happened, you really think that? People die all the time from the T-virus. They turn into monsters.”

“The problem doesn’t lie with them. The problem is that society keeps calling them monsters and sending those jackbooted thugs from the BSAA to massacre them. How should they react to that?”

A laugh slipped out before Sherry could stop it, a thin humorless sound. Manuela shrank back as if Sherry had shouted; the one thing she couldn’t stand was being made ridiculous. It was too bad, Sherry thought with a viciousness that surprised her. Manuela had quite handily completed the transformation from idealist to buffoon.

“You have no idea what it’s really like to be sick with that disease,” Sherry said. “You don’t actually know what it does to people. You got lucky, with your romantic abilities and your tragic scars, but you don’t actually know a thing about how people really suffer.”

Manuela had recovered somewhat, and she tilted her chin back proudly. “Believe what you like about me. Our lives up until this point have clearly been very different, and you’re obviously incapable of seeing past the silver cage your bourgeois lifestyle has bought you.”

Sherry could have laughed again if she had wanted to, but she stopped herself in time. “Call it whatever you like. I don’t consider what I have to be anything shameful either. I didn’t buy it with bourgeois privilege; I bought it with blood in Raccoon City.”

“Then this will work out well for you,” Manuela said quietly. “You will return a hero, the liberator who brought a sense of security back to those soft middleclass Americans who sleep so poorly at night.”

“Like it or not,” Sherry replied. “You’re a hero, too.”

She twisted the cap back onto the jar of peanut butter and handed it over. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Any time,” Manuela said. Her eyes lingered on Sherry a moment more, then she slipped the jar back into her pack and dug out a pair of tightly-rolled blankets. She tossed one of the bundles to Sherry, then unfolded the other and rolled up in it.

Sherry narrowed her eyes as she unrolled her own blanket. The peanut butter was one thing, but the blankets suggested that Manuela had expected to be spending the night out here. Though maybe she just believed in being prepared. Sherry glanced at her, as if she might be able to discern the truth from the expression on her face, but Manuela had already retreated to one of the corners of the barracks.

She didn’t so much as turn her head to acknowledge Sherry’s presence. Though she still wasn’t exactly clear on the rules of engagement, Sherry felt sure she had won the most recent skirmish in their ongoing fight. To celebrate her victory, she pulled out her phone and, without even bothering to disguise what she was doing, opened the files on the W Initiative.

Once she’d sorted out her father’s lab notes from the tangle of esoteric reports and experiment minutes, a proper narrative began to emerge. He’d begun work on the vaccine shortly after arriving in Raccoon City, and Sherry suspected that they’d transferred him out there specifically for that purpose, though she’d been just a baby when they had moved and couldn’t say for sure. 

Sherry couldn’t remember him ever mentioning anything like this around the house, not even in those times when she sat silently at the dinner table or the backseat of the car and listened to her parents talk about work.  She knew her father hadn’t kept it quiet on her account. Her parents had never held anything back when she was around; they had talked with each other openly, as if having forgotten that she was there.

The specter of the Subject, as Birkin referred to him, loomed over the entire project. Her father was careful never to refer to the Subject by name, but there could be no doubt who he meant. Then as now, only one man contained such terrible frontiers within his body.

They’d been friends back then, at least Sherry thought they had been, but she was not at all surprised that it had come to this. Whatever her father’s relationship to Wesker, it hadn’t stopped him from evaluating him for usefulness like he would a lab rat, mentally slicing him up to get to the juicy cuts that had the most potential for profit.

Sherry tried to convince herself that Wesker had known all along, that he had gone along with it willingly, like a sacrificial cow. She thought that if she could convince herself of that, it might go a long way towards exonerating her father. Yet however she might approach that explanation, she couldn’t get it to hang together. She had seen them together, after all. Her reedy, hesitant, bespeckled father; his tanned, handsome, mysterious confidante. No one would have believed that Birkin was capable of betraying a man like that, even if he had been capable of wanting it.

But Sherry had seen the last and most decisive difference between them, the one that counted for more than all the surface variations put together. A difference as much imagined as remembered, but not invented whole cloth. It was based on the hard truths that she had divined back then but had only recently gotten around to interpreting. She was certain that when her father had looked at Wesker, it had been with the charging drive of ambition. When Wesker had looked back at him, it had only been with the stupid, placid acceptance of an animal bred and raised for slaughter.

At least her father had won, Sherry though viciously. In the final contest, the one that really mattered, he had claimed a decisive victory.

Sherry paged through a few more lab reports, as if hoping the story had a proper ending. It didn’t, though she did find an official request for samples of more diverse cells. Heart, liver, cornea. He’d had grand plans for Wesker’s corpse. Jake had had grand plans too. Wouldn’t he be surprised to know that the father he had sought was nothing but a collection of cell cultures to be harvested?

Briefly, Sherry wondered if, in the absence of Wesker, this data put people on Jake’s tail. She didn’t think she needed to worry about that. Jake’s identity was secure. Besides, twenty years had gone by since Raccoon City and they were civilized now. There was no longer any need for human subjects, for dissections.

With all of her heart, Sherry believed that things had changed. They must have changed, or else she lived now in the same chaotic world of Raccoon City. Nothing had been learned and nothing gained, and all her suffering had been without sense or reason.

She could not bring children into a world like that, though she had often considered it. Even now, she wasn’t convinced that things would work out with her and Jake, but she had been confident for a long time that he would be a good father regardless. How little any of that would matter, though, if they still lived in the same cold and unfeeling place that their parents had.

Sherry read the final entry in the series over again. The detached catalogue of experiment results, followed by the equally bloodless analysis of Wesker’s character. They were the words of a small man who thought that he believed in his own superiority, but who in fact believed only in status and monetary gain. He had been so anemic of character, he hadn’t even known the difference.

In disgust, Sherry closed the file. She held her phone in her hand for a long time, thinking about calling Jake. He was probably worried, though she knew that he tended to worry well, without much damage to his immaculate self. All the same, worry was worry and fear was the same whether you put on a big production of it or not. She knew that she should call, if for no other reason than to tell him it had all been worth it, but she didn’t dial.

For all she had pined and sulked and felt sorry for herself, wishing that Jake were here to coax her through, she didn’t actually want to talk to him and try to explain herself. Not here, in this freezing barracks, with Manuela sleeping the sleep of the just, though not so far away that she wouldn’t be able to hear everything. None of it felt real, and she didn’t think drawing Jake in would give it any more weight or substance.

She’d set everything right later, and for what it was worth she really meant that.


	19. Chapter 19

At last, Leon slept: deep and dark, down past even dreams. At some point, Wesker roused him, but even then, as they moved upstairs through the dark house, listening to the wind creak in the world beyond the walls, he felt as if he were sleepwalking.

Wesker prodded him into the big bed in the master bedroom, the one that he had once struck Leon as struggling to fill. That seemed an impossibly long time ago now, a different era populated by different men. Leon got into bed without complaint, though he supposed that Wesker would take the first opportunity to leave. He'd go back downstairs and button himself up in scavenged jeans and an ill-fitting workshirt as if he were donning armor, and indeed they would seem like armor when he wore them.

He didn't leave, though. He got in the bed too, pinching the edge of the blanket between his thumb and finger and lifting it a few inches above the sheet. Then he slipped beneath it without disturbing it at all, without even causing the mattress on Leon's side to shift.

The bed was big enough that they could lie side by side without touching, but Leon didn't need physical contact to know that Wesker's body was stiff, his arms at his sides, his legs pressed together as if fused into a single beam from hip to ankle. He was poised like a diver who would enter the water without a ripple and sink to the bottom without a single wave.

Leon felt that he was sinking too. He could feel the pressure building in his head, like when he was a kid and he used to dive down deep, to see if he could touch the bottom of the pool. He remembered pitching a coin or something like that over the edge, and watching it sink down, down to where even the chlorinated water was dark and murky. Then he'd go in after it, feeling the water part before his youthful strength, measuring the pain building in his ears and behind his eyes, not fighting it but feeling it completely, marveling at it, as if he had never felt pain before and would never feel it again…

One moment he was awake and feeling Wesker's rigid body next to him without touching him, and the next he was fast asleep. Not feeling anything, not thinking, not even dreaming of those skeletal hands reaching for him.

It was like being dead; it was the best sleep of his life.

Waking up was slower going. Leon came to peacefully, and he took his time doing it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd fallen asleep without trouble and woken up without violence. This was something to be savored.

Eventually it occurred to him that his head wasn't resting on the pillow. Every bed in the house was piled high with goosedown pillows sheathed in Egyptian cotton cases. There was no mistaking them, and there was no getting away from the fact that he had somehow managed to miss them entirely. He'd found something considerably harder, but not unpleasant by any stretch, with a texture against his cheek that was like heavy velvet.

That was what finally got Leon to crack his eyes open; he had to figure out what he'd gotten himself into. His head was propped up on Wesker's shoulder so that his lips were pressed up against the rise of one of his sculpted pectoral muscles.

Wesker's chest and abdomen were perfectly proportioned, perfectly symmetrical. They had been one of the first things Leon had noticed about him, even if at the time he had done a pretty handy job of convincing himself that he hadn't noticed at all. Though Leon was still pretty solid after six months without regular work, his body had never been particularly prone to showing it. Twenty years ago and a few thousand drinks back, he might have had some chance of looking like that, but probably not.

Embarrassed, Leon pulled away, retreating back to his side of the bed. They'd both been plenty comfortable without any sentimental nonsense like that, and he hadn't meant to let Wesker think that wasn't the case.

"Sorry," Leon said, since he knew Wesker was awake. His voice sounded hoarse and raspy and his mouth still felt numb with sleep.

Wesker didn't reply right away. He still lay on his back with his arms at his sides, though he seemed a little more relaxed than he had. Even in the dim light, Leon could see that his eyes were open and he was staring up at the ceiling with fixed intensity.

"Was I out long?" Leon tried again.

"A while," Wesker said. "It's almost dawn."

"Did you get any sleep?" He honestly didn't know if Wesker needed sleep, if he could sleep. Maybe he just rested for a few minutes at a time, like a shark did, with his eyes open.

"A little," Wesker said. "I feel refreshed."

"As long as I didn't keep you up," Leon said.

All at once, Wesker turned towards him, though he did it without moving any closer and without giving any indication that he wanted to close the gap between them. "It's snowing."

"Yeah?" Leon said. All the windows in the bedroom were closed and had the curtains drawn. "Did you get up?"

Wesker shook his head, a minute twitch to one side. "I can smell it."

Leon was about to chalk it up to some kind of weird super sense, but then he realized that he could smell it too. There was a faint odor of wet pine, crisp and clean, the way fresh snow sometimes smelled when you got way out of the cities.

"Guess I should see if I can get the furnace working," Leon said. He sat up in bed; the blanket fell away from his naked shoulders to pool in his lap. His body felt heavy and his thoughts were still dull and slow as if wrapped in cotton batting, but he was pretty well awake now and there was no sense pretending he'd be able to get back to sleep. Even if he managed it, he'd probably just end up curled up against Wesker's side again. It wasn't a terrible place to be, but Wesker probably wasn't a fan of it.

"Do you want a drink?" Leon said, running his fingers through his hair and trying to get it to settle back into place.

"No," came the reply. Wesker hadn't moved at all to sit up, and under the blanket his body made the same ramrod straight line. His face was still the same rigid mask.

"Me neither," Leon said, though he had considered it for a second. "I could stand some coffee, though. After the furnace, I mean."

"Don't leave."

Leon looked back, startled. Wesker was watching him, his black-and-blue eyes about as steady and inscrutable as Leon had ever seen them. He made no move to reach for him, to pull him back. He had issued a command, and now all that was left was to wait for it to be obeyed.

He wasn't disappointed. Leon settled back down, knowing that he must have looked downright meek and chastised. He turned on his side and watched Wesker's rigid and immobile profile, more imagined than actually seen in the darkness. After a moment, Wesker turned too, so that they were facing each other. Now it was those muddy eyes, the color of rot, that Leon was forced to imagine.

"Listen," Wesker said, but it seemed that the word didn't sit right with him. For an instant, his expression took on that quality of falling in on itself, reversing back past the point where the mistake had been made so that he could do it over again, correctly this time.

"You were asleep for a long time," Wesker tried again. Leon almost laughed. It seemed like whatever Wesker had to tell him that was so important, they were going to have to small talk their way up to it.

"I was tired," Leon told him. "I hauled you across a few continents."

"That won't be necessary anymore."

This time, Leon really did laugh. "Are you dumping me? You don't have to break it to me so gently."

"It may soon become dangerous to be around me."

Leon chuckled again. He had to admit, he was keeping up a pretty brave front. "So you're protecting me. Guess you're a gentleman after all. But now it's your turn to listen to me. I knew what I was getting myself into when I brought you here, and you know that I knew. If you want me to leave, I'll think about it. But you're going to have to ask me to go rather than just gesturing at it."

He was pretty sure Wesker was going to call his bluff and do just that, and Leon was already kicking himself for laying the challenge out there like that. He knew that he couldn't leave, not out of any emotional attachment to the stains they'd left on the sofa, but for more practical reasons. As accommodating as he'd been over the past couple of days, Wesker still couldn't be trusted out there on his own.

To Leon's surprise, Wesker didn't say anything right away. He didn't turn away either, but he did shift his gaze so that it was focused on a spot above Leon's head rather than his eyes.

"Many things have come back," Wesker said. "Things I thought lost, and things I forgot. Even things that I forgot I had forgotten."

"Huh," Leon said.

Wesker's brows knitted together. It didn't occur to him that Leon was being a prick, though Leon himself knew that he had been flirting with priggishness just then. Wesker seemed only to think that he had failed somehow in conveying his intent and had to come up with another method.

"You say it has been four years," Wesker said. "Then it has been considerably longer than that since I last felt sexual arousal. It seems a uniquely human preoccupation. Sex, and the having of it, and with whom. But it is my preoccupation now."

He looked Leon square in the face again, wearing a curious wide-eyed look. It was the incredulous expression little children put on after being informed that they probably won't grow up to be an astronaut-fireman-rock star-president after all.

"I know what I was," he said defiantly. "A god. An ascended one, a late addition to the pantheon, like Dionysus, but god all the same. I can recall it in great detail even now. I know it happened just as I remember it, and yet it feels so much like a dream. It is those base, human preoccupations that seem real to me now."

All at once, his voice dropped off, becoming, not soft, but a good deal quieter. "I can remember it, but I can't feel it anymore. I can feel where you touched my skin, but I can't feel that."

"Sorry." Leon sighed. "I don't mean to be a jerk about it."

"I can feel my body, but I can't feel myself," Wesker continued, as if he hadn't heard.

"What you think you're missing, that's not you," Leon replied, surprising himself with the conviction in his voice. Wesker jerked his head non-committally, as if Leon's words were a fly that had buzzed past to annoy him.

"Wait," Leon said. "Just listen. I had Las Plagas, remember? And they got pretty far along, long enough for them to start whispering to me about all the possibilities. I know that wasn't me, though. I know because I got them out, and I remembered who I really was. Which wasn't a perfect man, but wasn't some puppet, some victim of crazy promises."

"I'm not like you," Wesker whispered hotly.

Leon felt his lips forming a smile; he didn't know where it had come from. He reached out and stroked Wesker's cheek, his fingers finding the places where he had touched him the night before. Leon remembered them, too.

"You're not like me," he said. "But you can remember who you are. You told me that you knew the first time you died that it was your decision. So that's who you are. It's not a lot to work with, but it's the best you've got."

"A dead man?" Wesker said, and it was almost a joke.

"Whatever it takes," Leon replied.

Wesker twitched his head again, a tiny motion of dissention. For a moment, it seemed like he would pull away, but the winding up of muscle under his hide ultimately went nowhere.

"If a dog who was your constant companion in childhood falls rabid, is he still the friend of your youth? If the sickness makes him something else, when does the change take place? Can it be pinpointed? Can it be measured with instruments or calculated mathematically? I must tell myself that I knew what I was doing, that everything had been in the service of some beautiful ideal. Even if I can't remember it anymore, I must tell myself that back then it meant something."

His hand went to touch Leon's wrist, and he seemed for a moment poised to pull him closer. He never did, though.

"I must believe that I was myself, and not merely in the thrall of some parasite that alters the behavior of its host. Because if I was not in control then, I have truly never had control."

He hesitated, and Leon knew it wasn't his place to interrupt. Eventually, Wesker closed his eyes and spoke again. "I was born to a specific purpose, and educated to fulfill a covenant. My research pleased me and my labor contented me, but I only had that because there were men who knew it would benefit them. I profited them, and I lived. If that profit ever stopped, then Umbrella might have done anything with me. I was a very novel and well-oiled machine, one which they could have scrapped for parts at any time."

Leon sighed. He'd honestly had no idea this was what Wesker had been trying to work himself up to, and now he understood why it had been so hard. It wasn't painful for him to admit, but it was humiliating. Leon knew that because he knew that at some point he had consented to being used as well; he had allowed himself to become a hand that held a gun and pointed it in the direction that someone else told him to. At least he'd had patriotism to fall back on. God only knew what Wesker had.

He went on. "Can you know what it is to be told the price you would bring at auction? To be told that your great intellect, of which you are most proud, is only worth the income it is able to generate? And then your very body, to know that there is still some value to be extracted from its cells—"

Wesker stopped abruptly. Leon's hand was still on his cheek, and now he shrank from it. "I sound hysterical."

"No," Leon said. "You don't." He cupped the back of Wesker's neck in his hand and pulled him close, kissing him with a steady confidence he hadn't been able to manage the night before. Christ, he was hopeless. A sucker for anyone with a hard-luck story. "I didn't know it was like that."

"No one did." Wesker didn't pull away, but all the tiny elegant muscles in his face were tense. His eyes were closed like maybe it was easier to talk without having to look at Leon or know that he was looking back at him. "No one alive."

It sounded like there was a hell of a story there too, but Leon didn't ask. He figured it would come out in its own time if Wesker wanted it too. He stroked Wesker's hair back from his brow. It seemed silly and insufficient, but Wesker had been responding pretty well to all those little gestures of comfort. He probably had a whole thing worked out in his head about endorphins and the stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain, the neurological and evolutionary reasons that having another person push his hair back felt like something he wanted.

He may very well have been right in his evaluation, but honestly Leon didn't care or want to hear about it. If Wesker was having a crisis of his very humanity, he ought to just accept that having sex with someone who was basically a stranger, and a hostile one at that, because he was hard up, or lonely, or trying to avoid dealing with something was about as human as it got.

"Listen," Leon said. "I want to talk about what happened last night."

Wesker's eyes remained closed, but his mouth moved along unfamiliar lines to form a smile. "I suppose you want to tell me that it wasn't like you."

"It wasn't," Leon said. "But that's not actually what I wanted to say. I just wanted to tell you that I'm glad it happened. It felt as if I was seeing a part of you that I actually liked a lot."

Wesker opened one eye into a catlike slit. It struck Leon as a very calculated, seductive gesture, but when he spoke he seemed as unsophisticated and artless as a teenager. "We could do that again."

Leon chuckled. "Yeah, we could."

Wesker shifted closer, bring his lips into proximity with Leon's. He didn't exactly kiss him, but he found the shape of Leon's mouth with his own. His hands went to Leon's shoulders, and he traced the shape those made, too. Not pushing or prodding him at all, but moving with him in a slow and measured way, as if he were merely calculating the amount of air Leon's body displaced.

Leon caught himself thinking about all those men and women Wesker kept back there in the vault of his unassailable past, all those conquests he'd left behind, not with a feeling that he was discarding them but with the unshakable confidence that they would be right where he had left them if he ever needed them again. He wondered if Ada had been one of them, and he felt a stab of jealous arousal in his stomach.

Abruptly, he grabbed Wesker by the wrists and shoved him onto his back, swinging a leg over so he straddled his waist. He felt Wesker wind tight beneath him, as if he might pull away. He seemed about to move, but in fact he was very still.

Leon pinned his trapped wrists to the mattress and then he leaned down and kissed him. "You know you're safe with me, right?"

"I know that," Wesker said.

"Okay, then." Leon kissed him again, and Wesker leaned into it. He was all right now, even though little shivers of tension kept running through him. He could have broken free at any moment, and indeed if he had decided to do so in earnest, Leon would have caught the worst of it. He didn't seem enamored with the idea of being held down, but he also seemed to want to push through it, if only to prove to himself that he could.

There was something appealing about the sensation of Wesker's great strength subjugated to his will, and at the thought of his terrifying intelligence obscured by a fog of need.

They must have gotten a taste of it too, Leon realized. All those people that Wesker spoke of in whispers and insinuations, those men who had tried to use him. And at that moment, perhaps they had become aware of the fact that the nuts and bolts of their well-oiled machine also came cradled in a chassis of the highest possible quality.

When Leon was slow in kissing him again, Wesker cracked his eyes open. "What's gotten into you now?" he said. Leon knew that he must have looked as if he had seen a ghost. Maybe that wasn't too far off the mark, since certainly he had glimpsed the specter of something morbid within himself, something that had wanted to throw a wrench into the works of Umbrella's valuable device, as if by doing that he might somehow set right all that had happened, balance the scales that Raccoon City had tipped out of alignment all those years before.

Slowly, he released Wesker's wrists and sat back, looking down at him like he was seeing him for the first time. He half felt like he was, though Wesker had not changed in the slightest and was in fact less disturbed than Leon was. He hadn't liked being held down, but he had weathered it. For when he had told Leon he trusted him, he'd meant it.

Wesker sat up, and Leon shrank away from him until Wesker's broad hands settled on his waist, holding him. "Did I say something wrong?" A gleam in the pit of his eye when he spoke betrayed a lack of sincerity that wasn't particularly subtle, a winking knowledge that Wesker could play this game as well.

In spite of himself, Leon laughed. He'd accidentally unearthed the corpse of the past that he kept interred within himself, but it was really dead this time. There was no permanent damage to either of them. He kissed the corner of Wesker's mouth and said, "I just realized I haven't eaten anything in almost 24 hours. I need it to keep up with you."

"I'm hungry," Wesker conceded reluctantly, though he seemed equally reluctant to loosen his grip on Leon's waist.

"We'll take a raincheck," Leon said. He kissed Wesker again, deeply, like he meant it, and he felt the very faint vibration of a moan floating up from the back of his throat. He swung his leg over and climbed off him, and Wesker let him slip away rather than releasing him outright.

Leon nodded. His hands trembled faintly as he pulled on a shirt and pants. Wesker watched him, and there was something about the man's eyes, heavy-lidded but burning, that made Leon think of a predator. Rather than ponder this, Leon focused on stumbling down to the stairs to the kitchen.

He got the coffee started on autopilot. The same as he might have instinctually checked the corners when walking into a strange room, or pulled a gun before could think consciously what the danger might be, he got out the pre-ground stuff and loaded it into the coffee maker and poured in the water. Wesker still hadn't come down, and that was fine with Leon. He had a nice enough face, but it was definitely a face a guy could get sick of.

The glass carafe in the bottom of the coffee maker was almost full enough for a whole cup with a little bit of room left over for something harder. Leon started hunting around for a mug, before he realized that the acrid odor in the air wasn't the smell of brewing coffee.

Slowly, carefully, so it made no sound at all, Leon closed the cabinet. He retreated back to the door, reaching for his shoulder holster.

His gun wasn't there. He'd left it upstairs.

"Shit…" Leon mouthed, but he didn't actually say anything aloud. His eyes were trained on the spot where the tiled floor peeped out from behind the island in the center of the kitchen. He only had to watch for a second, then a foot tipped with a massive claw slid out from behind the center island, and pivoted as gracefully as a dancer's before settling back on the tile floor with a soft click.

At the same moment, he heard the shuffling of feet behind him. Wesker had finally come downstairs, just in time to see the same terrible claw that Leon had.

"Get out of here," Leon said. "Head for the front door. I'm right behind you."

Wesker didn't move. Leon risked a glance over his shoulder and he knew that he had heard him. He stood rooted in place, his hands at his sides slowly curling into fists and his gaze falling back, back. Not into itself but into the past.

He watched the licker come around the edge of the kitchen island, its tongue waving around its head like a banner. Its head swiveled, the mass of tissue in the center of its face where its nose was twitching eagerly as it scented the air.

It stopped all at once, its hackles going up. It had found what it was after, and Leon suspected that he had nothing to do with it.


	20. Chapter 20

The creature lurched towards them, and Leon moved in the same instant. It bent its powerful hindquarters beneath itself to spring, but Leon had already cocked at the waist, feeling himself back on familiar footing in a moment.

He caught the licker in mid-leap with the ball of his shoulder, throwing all his weight behind the blow. The creature’s attention hadn’t been focused on him, and when Leon connected with it, the animal let out a sharp, indignant squawk of surprise. It was thrown off course, into the kitchen cabinets, which banged open on impact and disgorged their contents in a shower of broken glass. The licker lay on the tile, glinting with shards of shattered plates, whining for its lost wind.

Wesker was still standing in the doorway. He hadn’t moved at all, save, perhaps, to take a single step back. In the absence of his uncanny strength and unflappable sense of immortality, he’d had no idea how to react. Or maybe he had seen the licker focus its eyeless gaze upon him and in the same moment caught a glimpse of the barren cell or sterile lab or unmarked grave that awaited him out there and, for a terrible instant, had been unable to do anything but meekly submit to it.

Whatever the case, it wasn’t something Leon had much patience for. He seized Wesker by the arm and thrust him roughly back.

“Move,” he said. And then, in a tone that sounded curiously as if he were pleading, “Wesker.”

The sound of his name seemed to wake him. The rigid lines of his face ratcheted up a few notches tighter.

By that time, the licker had caught its breath and was righting itself. Leon was already retreating towards the front door, herding Wesker in front of him in case he decided to zone out again, so he didn’t see the creature spring. He only heard it when it hit the floor where they had been standing seconds before. Its claws scratched and scored the wood as it scrambled for traction, eventually skidding into the far wall, a blow that Leon knew would not stun it for long.

Leon thought at first that they might make it to the front door, and then out into the snow where the cold would make the licker sluggish. If he had been ten years younger, he would have managed it with wind to spare and the spring still in his step.

But Leon was no longer a young man. He wasn’t quite ready to count himself as old, but he knew he was far too old to be playing young men’s games. They wouldn’t make it outside, and if they did there would be no wind to spare, nor springing step, nor even an uncanny stroke of luck to carry him the half mile across open ground to where he had left the car.

Leon knew all of this without being aware that he knew it. Even if it had wound its way up into his conscious mind, there would have been no time to process it from one racing heartbeat to the next: the heartbeat where he knew with absolute certainty that they were not going to make it, followed immediately by the heartbeat in which he acted.

By a slight correction of his gait, he brought himself around behind Wesker’s back, making an obstacle that the licker would have to clear if it were going to get at its prey.

Something caught him up, like an oncoming freight train or the hand of an annoyed player sweeping him aside as if he were the pieces left on the board after a lost chess game. It came so quickly after Leon had made that decisive lateral move that the licker must have already been in the air. Leon must have cut it off mid-leap and knocked them both off-kilter more than he would have if his instincts or his sub-conscious – whatever was calling the shots for him now – had acted a second faster.

They both crashed to the floor, and Leon slid on his side, half-bowed over himself to protect his face, until he came to rest in the corner by the rack for rain boots and umbrellas. It must have looked ridiculous, even hilarious, he would think in hindsight, but in the moment his only concern was keeping his damn neck from getting broken.

His head cracked solidly against the plaster, and he lost consciousness. It was only for a split-second, but it was long enough for the darkness to swim up on him, bringing with it the tide of faces. Luis, Sasha, Adam, Deborah. All the nameless dead who had passed before him for an instant. All gone, because he hadn’t protected them. All of their deaths on his hands. All of them spiraling down into oblivion with him.

But Wesker’s face was not numbered among them.

Leon’s eyes snapped open. He felt a scream trying to bubble up from inside him, but all that came out was a whisper. The licker’s massive claw was pressing down on his chest, compressing his ribs until they creaked. He heard a popping sound next to his ear, followed by an uncomfortable pressure that started in his upper arm and spread all the way up the side of his neck to his ear. The creature had just clamped its steely jaws down on his shoulder, tearing into flesh and just narrowly missing his carotid artery.

There was a lot of blood, both on the floor and thundering in his head, but Leon felt very little pain.

Wesker would have made it to the door, outside, into the cover of the trees. He would make it further still, because Leon had moved when he had to shield him. He had saved him, when he had been unable to do the same for so many others. All those people long dead who would have lived better, or been more grateful, or even appreciated it more. He had not been able to save them, but he had saved Wesker. It didn’t balance the books, but it would at least put a tally in his favor when the time came to face all his accusers. A time that might come very soon now, for things, Leon reflected mildly, did not look very good for him.

All at once, the crushing weight on his chest lifted. Leon did scream then, the scream that had been building up inside him. He jerked to the side, as if to escape his own blood, pooling on the hardwood floor now, since the licker’s teeth had been unceremoniously ripped from his shoulder.

As he turned over on his back, he caught a confused glimpse of Wesker standing over him, then of him moving forward, propelled by some ingenious mechanism hidden away inside his well-oiled machine. It was not something Leon had seen before: one moment Wesker was beside him, and the next he was a good six feet away, where the licker had landed when he had booted it off Leon’s body. The creature was yelping like a punished dog, as Wesker swung one leg over it and crouched down and drove his fist into its exposed ribcage so that his arm vanished to the elbow.

Leon turned himself right-side up, struggled to his feet. He slipped in his own blood, gagged a little, but fortunately didn’t have much in his stomach to bring up. The arm on the side where he had been bitten hung down limply, slapping comically against his thigh like a cartoon of a Neanderthal. He could feel it, which was good, except that most of what he could feel was agony.

He stumbled over to where Wesker was systematically dismantling the creature with his fists and got a hold of his collar. Wesker turned on him, his hands raised, but when he saw Leon he immediately let them fall.

His arms were soaked to the shoulders with blood.

“We have to go,” Leon said. He didn’t know how he looked, but his voice sounded okay to his own ears. “Those things always hunt in packs.”

The snow was still coming down when they got outside. Leon couldn’t smell it anymore, but he could remember when it had smelled like that morning, when he had first awakened. It was rapidly drifting, as high as their knees in places, and Leon knew that he was leaving a fat crimson trail behind them. He hadn’t tried to look yet, but he had the feeling it was bad.

They made it out to the car, and Leon coaxed the cold engine to life with his one good hand. They made it to the main road, and Leon started heading west. It seemed like a long time had passed, but it had probably only been a few minutes. Wesker was very still in the seat beside him, as if frozen in place. Leon tried saying his name to snap him out of it; that had worked before.

“Wesker. I need you to take a look at my shoulder.”

Wesker turned towards him, moving his head just a fraction of an inch. Even that seemed to sap his strength.

Leon’s own eyes were fixed straight ahead. He didn’t dare take them off the road. “Look, you froze up in there. No use pretending that’s not what happened. We both saw it. You froze because you were scared, and it was bad. But I got the worst of it, and I need you to help me now.”

Wesker trembled in his seat, as if he’d been jolted by a sudden current. He leaned over, and his bloody hands expertly found the bloody edges of Leon’s shirt where they had sunk into his wound. It hurt, but not much. Wesker had a touch as gentle and impersonal as a surgeon’s.

He folded back the shreds of fabric and wiped the blood away with a trailing sleeve. “It’s infected,” he said.

Leon understood each word, but he was unable to comprehend them as a whole, strung together in that particular order. They kept butting up against a stubborn wall of disbelief in him mind. “Infected how?” he said at last. “Infected with what?”

“The T-virus,” Wesker said. “I can tell by the discoloration of the skin. Sepsis is localized, but it will spread quickly once the viral load in your system reaches a tipping point.”

His eyes flickered momentarily up to Leon’s face. “The incubation period is generally around 72 hours.”

Leon opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say. They drove in silence for a full minute, before he felt Wesker’s hand move along his back, tracing the curve of his spine well-clear of the wound.

“You’ll experience a period of accelerated healing at the infection site,” he said quietly. “So you won’t be in much pain or danger of circulatory shock.”

Leon’s brow furrowed. He tried again to speak, not knowing what he might possibly have to say. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Wesker said. “Death is a certainty once the infection takes hold, which is always does in cases like this. But you will have a few days of lucidity before your neurological condition begins to deteriorate. The first mutations generally appear within 24 hours after that.”

“I never thought—“ Leon said, but he broke off before he could finish. He had never dared to think it, and yet it had happened. Now he would face it without railing against fate or pitying himself.

It should have happened long ago.

Leon tried again. “I’ll take you as far as I can. Then you’ll have to find a way to disappear on your own. And I’ll have to make sure there isn’t another outbreak. Does fire still work?”

“Fire has always been effective,” Wesker said. His voice was almost a whisper.

“All right,” Leon said. He gingerly tried to take the steering wheel in both hands. His injured arm moved much more easily now. It wouldn’t be so bad this way, if he could put enough distance between them and the cabin. Stick to the back roads. If they didn’t run into trouble, it would be a really nice drive.

A nice drive suited him just fine right now. He might as well enjoy it. He settled back in his seat and tried to force himself to relax, but the nerves in his back kept jumping, as if they could feel the virus spreading through him and were trying to warn him. Suddenly the road turned indistinct before his eyes, as if glimpsed through a prism.

He had begun to cry before he knew that he would. It wasn’t just a few tears slipping out of him, either. That would have been easy to understand; that would have been simple enough for both of them to ignore. But he wasn’t going to get off that easily, not him. He felt his breath burning in his throat, and a terrible tempest gathering behind his eyes.

Leon slammed on the breaks and jerked the wheel so that the car pulled over to the shoulder. Then he slumped over the dash and pressed his fists against his eyes and wept into them, gasping for breath between sobs that ripped through him.

Wesker didn’t try to touch him once the entire time. He didn’t move to get out of the car and give him a little peace, either. When Leon finally straightened up, bleary and exhausted, Wesker was sitting right where he had left him, though he had maybe moved away a little, pressing himself up against the inside of the passenger door as if swept aside by Leon’s flood of emotion. His eyes were straight ahead, fixed on the snow that fell beyond the windshield.

“Leon,” he said, very quietly.

“I’m feeling sorry for myself,” Leon said. He wiped at his eyes, which felt as if they had been scorched. “I’ll take you as far as I can. We can make Canada. You can disappear in Canada, can’t you? Or do you like the South?”

“Leon,” Wesker said again. The word was like the tiniest bit of slack being let out of his rigid face. “I can fix this.”

“Don’t,” Leon said fiercely. His voice was hoarse as if his throat had been rubbed raw. “I’ve seen what it does. I’ve seen it happen too many times to want to hear any hope-springs-eternal bullshit from you.”

“I said that I could fix it, and I intend to,” Wesker sniffed. “As long as you don’t do that again.”

“Do what?” Leon said. “You mean, get _emotional_? Christ, Wesker, you’re a fucking asshole. This is my body we’re talking about.”

Wesker folded his arms and assumed an expression that he probably thought made him look stern and commanding, but which Leon thought came off more like a sulk. “Drive the vehicle,” he said.  “If you think we’ve escaped them you’re even more credulous than I took you for.”

“Fuck you,” Leon muttered, but his voice was threatening to crack again and he was afraid he might lose his grip a second time. Nothing like that sudden storm of tears had ever happened to him before, and he’d been sure he was going to die many times. He’d made peace with his own mortality a long time ago, long before he’d seen his first BOW, in the dark weeks following his brother’s death when he’d set to work strangling that part of himself that wanted what it wanted out of life.

But he didn’t want to die, not like this. Not at all. Just thinking it was like a revelation, the one thing he had never dared to hope for, because if he wanted it too much it might mean that he had given less than his all in the past. That all those deaths on his conscience, all those people he had lost, really had been his fault.

With a trembling hand, he turned the ignition over and started the car up again. He reached over and turned on heater; the blood soaking his shirt was starting to freeze. They went west, since Leon figured they’d hook up with a highway eventually. All was quiet on the roads, which struck him strange. He couldn’t imaging that anyone who really wanted Wesker – wanted either of them – would have called it good at a couple of lickers.

After a while, Wesker spoke. His voice was so quiet that Leon had to all but hold his breath to hear it over the sounds the tires on the wet pavement. “I know that you were trying to protect me. You said that you would, and yet I didn’t really believe it until it happened.”

“It’s not like I did it to impress you,” Leon said.

“I know that,” Wesker replied. “I just thought…”

He didn’t say what he had thought. His brow furrowed as if he were trying to conjure up the right words for it, then he abruptly changed the subject. “My immune system can produce antibodies that attack the T-virus protein. The virus has certainly mutated since I last encountered it, but the core genetic markers remain the same regardless of how much time passes. I will be able to synthesize an anti-retroviral compound.”

Leon’s stomach twisted into knots. He felt his heart pounding hard against his ribs. “For this?” he said. “For what’s in me?”

“Yes,” Wesker replied. “Yes, I’m certain. The sooner it is administered, the better your chances of survival. The first 48 hours are critical. But even if you died, it would not be due to any fault in my work.”

Leon took a deep breath. He was being very careful not to allow himself to expect or hope for too much. “How do you synthesize it?” he asked. “Do you need to stop by a CVS and pick up some stuff?”

“It would require specialized equipment, but once I had access to that I could do it very quickly.” Wesker’s fingers curled against his thighs. It was a subtle nervous twitch, but not so subtle that Leon didn’t notice it. “There is a place. A lab that would have everything I need.”

“Where?” Leon asked.

 “Raccoon City.”

Leon could have slugged him. “I hate to break it to you, but there is no Raccoon City anymore. Your fancy chemistry set is either buried under a ton of rubble or so irradiated it glows green.”

“No,” Wesker said. “The place is outside the city, beyond the blast radius. I checked the satellite imagery shortly after the bombing. I know that it’s still standing.”

Leon was quiet for a minute. He felt very cautious, and he knew he had to be careful not to hope for anything. “You know, I haven’t been back since it happened. I haven’t been anywhere near that place.”

“Nor have I,” Wesker said.

Leon glanced over at him. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The ones on the right, the side where he’d been bitten, moved a lot more easily. He could tell the bleeding had stopped too. But something still felt wrong on that side; his hand was cold, despite the fact that it was right in front of the heating vent on the dash.

“It’s a lot of ground to cover,” Leon said quietly. “But we could probably make it in a day or so if we take it in shifts.”

“I can’t drive this vehicle,” Wesker admitted.

“What do you mean? You can’t drive at all?”

“I was never taught,” Wesker said stiffly. “I always had a private driver.”

The better for Umbrella to keep their investment well in hand, Leon supposed. Too late to change that now. “Fine,” Leon said. “I can drive straight through.”

“Not if your condition begins to deteriorate,” Wesker said. “It can happen almost without warning. I’ll just have to learn.”

“That’s stupid,” Leon told him. “You might get in trouble, and if I’m going to go downhill as fast as you say, I won’t be able to bail us out.”

Wesker shifted in his seat. Leon knew that he was looking at him now; he could feel his eyes boring a pair of accusatory cigarette-burn holes into him. He didn’t look over at him right away. Eventually, he forced the cold, stiff fingers of his right hand to uncurl from the steering wheel. He reached over and set his hand over Wesker’s. Leon half-expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. He only dropped his eyes in a gesture that came off almost modest.

“There’s someone I can ask for help,” Leon said. “He’s reliable, and I trust him. But you’re not going to like it.”

“You mean him, don’t you?” Wesker said. “My son.”

“Yeah,” Leon said. “Jake.”

It wasn’t until that moment that Leon realized Jake had actually been on Wesker’s mind over the past few days. He wondered if that was what Wesker had been thinking about that morning, while Leon slept beside him, the sleep of a job well done. He was ashamed, for in truth he hadn’t thought about Jake at all since they’d gone their separate ways.

“I never knew about him,” Wesker said abruptly. “You believe that, don’t you?”

“I guess I do,” Leon replied. “And he will too. Just don’t expect it to make much of a difference?”

“I have no expectations.” Wesker said. Then he nodded, though it was really just a slight tipping of his head. “All right. Do what you must.”

“I’m going to call him,” Leon said. Then, just because it seemed like something he should do, he added, “Thanks.”


	21. Chapter 21

They picked Jake up at a truck stop outside Philadelphia. It was still snowing, though more lightly now, and Jake was bundled up in a wool trench coat and scarf. It was more of a fall getup, not right for the weather, though it did look good on him, even Leon had to admit.

With a wrench of pity, Leon realized that Jake had dressed for the occasion. He, who had always been so straightforward and realistic, had chosen those impractical fall layers. Maybe it was because he thought it was what his father would want him to look like, or because it was how he wanted his father to see him when he laid eyes on him properly for the first time.

When Leon pulled up, Jake hung back cautiously until he was sure it was him, then he jogged across the snowy parking lot. His heavy military boots crunched on the ice, and the tails of his coat flapped in the wind, smacking against his thighs. He looked arrayed for battle, which may very well have been exactly how he was going into this.

Jake stopped by the driver’s side door and Leon rolled down the window. “Thanks for coming.”

“Nothing better to do,” Jake said. He slipped into the back seat. “Just dodging calls from Sherry’s bosses.”

Leon started the engine. He felt Jake’s eyes boring into the back of his neck, felt them clutching at him like drowning men scrabbling at a spar, trying to delay the moment when he would have to acknowledge Wesker’s presence. Wesker seemed content to wait it out; he was looking out the window into the falling snow.

“You look like shit, Leon,” Jake said, deliberately not acknowledging Wesker, who by this point also wasn’t the freshest, if Leon was being totally honest.

“Yeah, I know.” Leon sighed. He knew he had to put an end to this. Rip the bandage off in one pull and let the wound breathe a little. “Jake. This is—“

“Hey,” Jake said, cutting him off. His eyes flicked momentarily to Wesker’s arrogant profile, then immediately back to Leon.

“Hello,” Wesker said icily.

“Look, Jake…” Leon paused. He’d felt a hitch in his back, a little twitch in his shoulder, as if something alive had shifted beneath the skin. He risked a glance in Wesker’s direction, wondering if it was starting already. Wesker didn’t even seem to notice.

“What am I looking at?” Jake was saying dryly. The snake-in-the-grass sensation in his shoulder had abated, and Leon marshaled himself back under control.

“Look,” he said again. “I wouldn’t have called you, but I really need your help. You’ve probably got plenty you want to say, but I need you to bite your tongue for the next 72 hours. Can you do that?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I can do that. But, jesus, Leon. You’re just lucky Sherry likes you so damn much.”

“I am lucky,” Leon said wearily. He pulled out of the truck stop and got on the I-70 and headed west. The feeling of something moving beneath his skin did not return, although he waited for it, all his senses attuned to that no-longer-painful spot on the back of his shoulder. Though the flesh itched like a broken bone healing inside a cast, whatever was inside him seemed to have fallen dormant for the time being.

Near the Ohio border, they stopped at a gas station. They’d left the snow behind and the sun was high and bright. Leon took a quick inventory of his bare feet, his torn and blood soaked clothing, and decided against getting out. He sent Jake to pay for the gas and buy coffee while he waited in the car.

Once Jake had disappeared inside, Leon turned to Wesker. He had hardly moved for the past hundred miles or so, which Leon had at first taken for a tantrum and ignored. But it had gone on long enough now, that he was starting to get a little creepy. He reached over and touched Wesker’s wrist, and he stirred a little.

“You okay?” Leon said.

“Yes.” Wesker turned to face him. Leon had gotten used to seeing him in the soft glow of the cabin’s mood lighting. In direct sunlight, he seemed different: Paler than Leon had thought, with dark circles under his eyes and deep creases across his forehead. His eyes were still the same muddy purple, bereft of light and depth; Leon had been right about those. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Anything you want to talk about?”

“No.” Wesker frowned slightly, which made the lines on his forehead deepen. “Not yet.”

“That’s fine,” Leon said. “Though I guess I don’t have to tell you, I might not be here to listen forever.”

“You’ll be fine,” Wesker replied. “You’re healthy and strong.”

“That sounds like a promise. I thought doctors didn’t make promises like that.”

“You watch too many television dramas,” Wesker snorted. “You’ll be all right. You’re going to live. Nothing dies unless I say so.”

Leon shivered. “Guess you’ve got it all figured out.”

“Let me look at it.”

Leon turned around so Wesker could get to his shoulder. His hands were as clinical as he remembered: gentle but not comforting, professional but lacking utterly in human warmth. “It’s not serious,” Wesker said. “It’s nothing.”

After a moment, he added, “Does it hurt much?”

“No,” Leon told him. “It itches like crazy, though. What does it look like? Some kind of rash?”

Wesker hesitated before he replied. “Not a rash. It’s similar to an abscess.”

Leon scowled. That was a gross word for a gross phenomenon, and Leon knew he probably should have let the matter drop. He needed a clear head if he was going to get them to Colorado. Jake had been behaving himself so far, but Leon knew as well as anyone the dammed-up torrent of rage he was carrying around inside. It wouldn’t take much to set him off the way things were going.

It was better this way, Leon thought; better not to know what was going on inside him so he could focus on what was happening without. But there had been that moment of hesitation when he had asked Wesker about the wound, that slight tremor to his voice that he wouldn’t have caught if he hadn’t spent the last 48 hours practically sitting in the man’s lap.

If Wesker was nervous, then Leon knew he probably ought to have been terrified.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Leon said. “Just tell me if there’s something I need to know.”

Wesker didn’t say anything right away. He smoothed the tatters of Leon shirt back down, then pressed his hand flat against his spine. Awkwardly, he slid it upward to cup Leon’s shoulder. In the full sunlight, Leon could see a dusting of faint brown spots, indicating age, on the back of Wesker’s hand. For some reason that Leon could not articulate, they were fascinating and precious to him. He raised his own hand, and pressed the palm over Wesker’s long fingers.

“It’s spreading more quickly than I had anticipated,” Wesker said. “But it is under control. You are healthy and strong, and you will fight. You’ll fight to the very last.”

“You got that right,” Leon said, but he wasn’t sure that was going to be enough. He started to ask, but it was at that moment that the backdoor of the car banged open.

Jake got halfway in before he spat, “What the fuck?”

Leon sighed and dropped his hand away from Wesker’s, who was in no hurry to let him go in turn.

“I think I’m going to fucking puke—“ Jake grumbled as he slid into the car, but he abruptly broke off when he saw Leon’s shoulder. “Hey, Leon?” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” Leon replied. “But we’ve got it handled.”

“I’ve seen something like that before,” Jake said, eyeing them suspiciously. “A couple of times.”

“Wesker says he can take care of it.” Leon glanced over his shoulder, briefly taking in Wesker’s still profile, somehow more handsome now that Leon had found the fine lines and flaws in it. “I trust him.”

“Suit yourself,” Jake said. “It’s your life. I got a gun in my backpack, just so you know. He has a habit of not taking care of things when he should.”

“I trust you too,” Leon replied evenly. “I know you’ll do what needs to be done.”

Jake fished a plastic bag of beef jerky out of the sack of supplies he’d bought inside. He tore it open and savagely chewed a piece as Leon started the car.

“Worst road trip ever,” Jake sighed as they made for the highway.

***

It was in the great flat belt of land just past Kansas City that Leon started having trouble seeing the highway.

He had driven all through the day without much trouble aside from the occasional hiccup or twitch on his right side. His shoulder kept trying to creep up, contorting itself into a shrug. The itching had spread across his back, and then stopped. Now there was only the dull ache deep inside and the occasional bead of tepid liquid rolling down his back.

Other than that, he felt surprisingly good. He’d driven for about fifteen straight hours by his estimation and he wasn’t tired. He wasn’t even hungry, though he’d had no appetite all day and the last time he’d been able to choke down a little water was before they’d hit Dayton.

When things started to go south, they went all at once. The road that had seemed so sturdy all day suddenly turned to water before him. It swam in the headlights, and blurred, and finally shrank to a tiny pinpoint in a sea of black static. Leon’s hand went slack on the wheel and the car started to drift. The tires hit the rumble strip on the side of the road, and the sound seemed very far away indeed. Leon was slow to place it, too slow…

All at once, a hand closed around the steering wheel and guided the car back onto the blacktop. Leon blinked a few times, coming to his senses. He felt nauseous, but it wasn’t because he’d almost pitched them all off the road and into a corn field. That barely registered at all, in fact. He just felt sick, as if someone had introduced about a quart of acid to his stomach.

His pulse pounding in his ears, Leon lifted his foot off the gas and eased the car over onto the shoulder. Jake kept his hand on the wheel the entire time, leaning over the center console from the backseat to do it.

“My turn to drive,” he said.

“Yeah,” Leon rasped. His tongue felt as if it had grown huge and heavy, and his voice sounded ridiculous to own ears. “Sorry. I don’t know what happened. I just lost—“

Jake wasn’t listening. He’d already hopped out of the car. Leon glanced at Wesker, who was watching him steadily, not looking towards Jake at all. In just the little glow that came from the dome light, it was impossible to make out his expression. Leon felt that he had a lot to say to him; if nothing else, he owed him an explanation or an excuse for the past 48 hours.

Nothing specific came to mind, though.

Jake pulled open the door on Leon’s side. He waited there, stiffly, not even offering Leon a hand to help him out, though Leon had to admit he was pretty shaky. On the third try he managed to boost himself out of the driver’s seat. He stumbled into the back while Jake took the front.

“You left slime all over the seat up here,” he said.

“Just a little blood,” Leon replied.

“It’s not blood,” Jake snapped. He pushed the seat back viciously to accommodate his longer legs. “Whatever. Just get some rest. Lay on a blanket or something.”

Leon wasn’t listening. His pulse throbbed in his ears like an immense pressure pounding on the inside of his skull. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and lay down across the seat and focused on his breathing.

Up front, Jake started the car and pulled off the shoulder. Blinkers and everything. What a good boy he was, he thought, not without some measure of disgust. Wesker wasn’t looking at him, but Jake could feel him paying attention. In that moment, Jake hated him as much as he ever had, and he was more desperate to impress him than ever before.

After a while, Leon quieted down in the backseat. Jake hoped that he was asleep and not feeling much, since he’d clearly been feeling plenty earlier. Without the pained hiss of his breathing to break up the monotony, an awkward silence fell over the car. Jake flipped the radio on with a fumbling, nervous hand. There wasn’t much up or down the dial, just a high-and-lonesome voice singing _Go Rest High on That Mountain_ against a backdrop of a bunch of static.

They went around a curve and then even that was lost.

“Aksinya,” Wesker said abruptly. “Aksinya Mueller is your mother.”

Jake flinched at the first word as if anticipating a blow. He was ashamed when he realized it was only his mother’s name.

“Was,” he said. He shifted his grip on the steering wheel and wondered if he was going to puke. He felt like he’d just reached the top of the first high hill of a roller coaster and the cart had paused for a second so he could see all the jolts and jerks he was going to have to get through before the ride was over. “She _was_  my mother.”

Wesker hesitated for a moment, then he said, “I see.”

“It was some kind of auto-immune thing,” Jake said. “And it hurt a lot. It moved so slow, it took her years to die. By then, she’d been dying for almost as long as I’d been alive.”

“I had no idea,” Wesker mused. He seemed to be comparing what Jake had said to some vast library of medical literature he kept filed away in his head.

“Now you do,” Jake said harshly. “So what are you going to do about it?”

“You have my condolences.”

“I don’t want them,” Jake said. “I just want a goddamn payday. All the back payments for all the pain you caused us because you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants. That’s why Leon and I came looking for you in the first place. I made him come, because I thought you were dead. I wanted to find your bloated corpse and drag it back with me and finally get some of that money you’ve been sitting on for all these years.”

Wesker was quiet for a long time. Jake wasn’t sure if he meant to speak again, and he was just starting to get used to the silence when Wesker said, “There is no money. There hasn’t been for a long time.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s the truth. I sold off a good deal of shares of Umbrella stock before the company went bankrupt, and I had my patrimony to draw from. But I spent both long ago. I’ve been a charity case for years.”

“You're lying…” Jake started to say. But he couldn’t get any further than that. He knew it wasn't a goddamn lie. All at once, he felt a hot pressure in his throat, and his eyes got cloudy. Christ, it had been a long time since he’d cried over anything, much less spilt milk.

It wasn’t the money exactly. The money had been a promise he had made to himself, a guarantee that everything would work out all right. His new life, Sherry, the tenuous hope of the world that he had saved; the money was to have been a down payment on all these things. It would have finally made him worthy of them. Without it, he was afraid that he might, at any moment, be thrown back through the years and over the miles. He might go to sleep one night in Sherry’s comfortable bed, but wake up on the floor of a hovel in Edonia, with his belly empty, the stove cold, and the sound of a ceaseless wet cough ringing in his ears.

The money had turned out to be as much of a ghost as the man. His mother had maintained that Wesker would come for them one day. Right up until the end, she had been sure of it. Though by then she no longer seemed to think he was a good man, she was convinced that he would do the honorable and decent thing.

Wesker was here now, just as she had foretold, but he hadn’t come to bail Jake out. Here was a very different man from the sturdy, steely-minded genius his mother had described. He looked uncertain, tired, faded by suffering and years. And just as the promise of his inheritance had been dashed, Jake felt the image of his father he had been carrying around in his mind for all those years begin to splinter and break apart.

“She thought you were a great man,” Jake said, his voice barely a whisper. A couple of tears slid down his cheeks, one from each eye. It was dark, and he didn’t think Wesker had seen them. “I guess she had to believe that, because if you were great than she could think a little bit better of everyone else. Including herself, and me.”

“Let go of the past,” Wesker said. “I didn’t know of your existence, nor of her illness. You may blame me for that if you like. But think how much worse the situation might have been if I had known. My father’s company intended for years to turn me into a test subject when I had outlived my usefulness. Imagine what they might have done to someone who shared my blood but not my research. You were at least safe in your ignorance.”

Wesker pressed a hand to his chest, as if he could feel the cursed blood they shared coiling in his breast like a viper. For a second, Jake thought he might be able to feel it too.

“Old news,” he said hoarsely. “They got me already.”

“Oh?”

“In Lianshang,” Jake told him. “Actually, I guess you missed that one. It was a bad scene, but it sorted itself out in the end. Got a nice little vaccine out of it.”

He felt Wesker’s eyes on him, studying him. “Then you know what you are?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I know who I am. Do you?”

“A great man. At least, one who was very nearly great.”

“Close don’t count,” Jake said. “Sorry to tell you.”

Wesker’s lips gave a strange twitch. He seemed to be attempting to smile.

Jake drove in silence for a few miles, not daring to look anywhere but the road unwinding directly before him. His heart was pounding and his mouth tasted coppery. He felt like he had just run for his life or tussled with someone who was earnestly trying to kill him. The brief conversation he’d had with Wesker kept replaying itself in his mind, and even the disappointment of losing out on his inheritance was eclipsed by the terror of knowing that he had actually talked with his father.

They went through an oasis of light: a row of streetlamps illuminating an exit that led to a truck stop marooned on the prairie. After they had passed it and the dark closed in on them once more, Jake said, “Listen. About Leon…”

“He can be saved,” Wesker said. “I wouldn’t be here if I was not sure that he could be saved.”

“But it’s bad,” Jake murmured. “That thing on his back…”

“How long did it take them to synthesize a vaccine from your natural antibody?”

“Six months.”

“I can do the same in six hours,” Wesker replied. “And so I say that he can be saved.”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Jake said. “I like Leon a lot. I mean, I’m not crazy about having him for a step-dad, if that’s what you two are up to. But I guess you like Leon, too.”

“I owe him,” Wesker said. “I haven’t forgotten how to repay a debt.”

Jake glanced at him. Wesker’s expression had darkened; he was uncomfortably tense. Jake knew that he had no way of ever knowing what had happened after he’d left Leon at the airstrip, or exactly what had gone on in Antarctica before they arrived. However, it was clear that some combination of the two had left Wesker deeply shaken.

He was changed, somehow. That much was obvious. Jake hadn’t known the man before, and he’d had nothing but unfounded rumors of what he was like in life to go on. Still, you didn’t have to be the guy’s best friend to know that something profound had happened to him. He wore his own skin as if it were an uncomfortable disguise, with only those muddy haunted eyes serving as a clue to what lay beneath.

“I saw the files they kept on you in that lab,” Jake said after a while. He hadn’t wanted to bring the subject up yet, had wanted to save it as a surprise, perhaps to deploy at a moment when Wesker’s guard was down and it could do some damage. He’d never had much patience for that kind of strategy, though. “I saw what they did. Even Leon doesn’t know the details like I do.”

“This body still feels pain,” Wesker said quietly. He clenched his fists against his thighs, as if to remind himself of their strength. “I had forgotten. And, worse still, forgotten the forgetting.”

He was quiet again, this time for a long time.

“I didn’t think that anyone would come,” he admitted at last.

“What did they want with you?” Jake said. “At first I thought it had something to do with how you can heal. But it was too haphazard for that. It lacked that – what’s it called? – scientific rigor. And then the way they left you for dead. They were doing something else, weren’t they?”

“I’ve considered the same thing,” Wesker admitted. “And I don’t know what they wanted. Though I may have the opportunity to find out soon. They have not given up.”

“Oh,” Jake said. And then, “That sucks.”

“They may hunt me down again very soon, or not for a long while. I don’t know what kind of technology they have at their disposal. We can make it to Raccoon City, though. There’s still a little time left.”

Wesker sounded like he was set on that, and Jake wasn’t about to argue. When he’d first called Jake, Leon at least might have mentioned that someone was after them. He also might have mentioned that he was about a hair’s breath away from turning into some kind of abomination. Not much of a phone guy, that Leon.

“They don’t want you,” Wesker said, as if he had read Jake’s thoughts. “Or him. They want me, and so if you are smart you’ll be fine.”

“Was Leon not smart, then?”

“No, he wasn’t,” Wesker said quietly. “He was very stupid indeed. I don’t know why he does the things he does.”

“You mean like, save your sorry ass? I don’t know why he did that, either. I told him not to.”

Wesker didn’t seem hurt, or even surprised to hear that. In fact, he seemed not to be paying attention at all.

Jake sighed. “Leon’s not that complicated. He does the things he does because he really wants to help people. There’s no secret motive; he’s honestly just that corny. He wants to save everyone because he thinks they’re all as good and noble as he is.”

Wesker got quiet again at that, mulling it over. The big, flat, dark prairie stretched out ahead of them, giving him plenty of time to break it down into digestible parts. After a while he said, “Pull over up here.”

Jake might have argued or refused, just to be a pain the ass, but he didn’t. He eased the car over on the shoulder and flipped on the hazard lights. Wesker got out, and moved around to the back seat. He slid in next to Leon, who roused a little.

“Are we there?” he asked blearily.

“Not yet,” Wesker said. “But I’ve come to keep an eye on your condition.”

“Thanks,” Leon said. “I could use the company.”

Jake didn’t hear the rest. He started the engine and turned up the static on the radio. Then, he started driving. The tank was half-full and they’d hit Raccoon City around dawn. He wondered if Leon would actually last that long. Wesker seemed convinced that he could cure him, but Wesker’s track record honestly wasn’t great. He’d gotten more things wrong than right over the years.

Though Jake was pulling for him, he was nothing if not practical, and he was already resolved to kill Leon rather than let him become something he would never have wanted to be.


	22. Chapter 22

It took most of the morning to get through the Arklay Mountains, but by midday they were in the West. Jake had never been beyond the Mississippi River, and indeed the idea that there might be more America beyond his Arlington condo and the rumors of Sherry’s job in DC had occurred to him only in the most abstract sense. He had a notion that West was where humanity’s past went to die, washed up on the beach of the Pacific like the corpse of a whale.

But Umbrella hadn’t even made it that far before turning belly up and expiring. It had fallen on the side of the road, a convenient landmark on the route that led to the end of history.

Wesker’s lab wasn’t on any maps of the area, but he knew the GPS coordinates by memory. Getting there involved taking a lot of back roads, including one that was marked for wildfire access only. The car wasn’t really suited for that kind of driving, but Jake got them there in the end.

As they wound up the side of the mountain, the trees gradually thinned out. The ones that remained were stumpy and twisted, like little kids that hadn’t gotten enough Vitamin D. They must have been at almost 10,000 feet, and Jake was starting to feel the altitude. He had a splitting headache and some vague stirrings in his gut like he might puke. He hadn’t looked in the backseat in a while, but he could hear the rasp of Leon’s breathing, the way he struggled with each inhalation.

Jake tried not to listen, tried not to think too hard about it. He focused on the road instead, what little there was left of it. Eventually, he hit a break in the forest, and in the clearing on the other side was a great galleon of a mansion, stuck up against the side of the mountain, reminiscent of Fitzcarraldo.

“Is this it?” Jake said.

“Yes,” Wesker replied.

“I didn’t think it would be so tacky.”

Jake inched up to the front gate. The iron doors had fallen backwards, into the courtyard, but it was still a pretty tight fit. One of the rearview mirrors clipped off as Jake squeezed between the stone posts. He drove up the overgrown walk, between the ruins of marble angels that were at the stylistic crossroads of William Faulkner and Disneyland Haunted Mansion.

He pulled right up to the slouched front porch. Wesker was already trying to rouse Leon, and having more luck with it than Jake had expected, which still didn’t amount to much.

“You’ll walk now,” Jake heard him say quietly. “It won’t be far.”

He pulled Leon out of the backseat and tugged one of his arms over his shoulders, stooping a bit to manage it. It was the first time Jake had seen the two of them in the light of day, and it stopped him dead in his tracks for a moment.

They were both covered in a crust of old blood. It had soaked their clothing and dried into rust-colored scales on their exposed skin. There was a lot caked into Leon’s hair, which had stiffened into matted ropes on one side of his head. He was missing his shoes, and his shirt hung off his shoulder on one side, torn to ribbons. Through the holes in the fabric Jake could see a map of bluish-black veins pulsing under his skin.

Leon’s eyes rolled around in their sockets for a second, before finally settling on Jake. He seemed to know him, which was a good sign, though it was about the only one. Against the greenish skin of his face, his lips looked blue.

“Kid…” he managed to grind out, but Jake honestly didn’t want to hear it. He wasn’t much for leaning in close to catch some poor soldier’s last words. Do that for everyone who came along and you just ended up carrying the whole world’s regrets around with you.

Instead of letting him talk, Jake grabbed Leon’s arm savagely. “I hope it’s warmer inside.”

He started up the steps toward the mansion’s great front door. Wesker was still on Leon’s other side, his arm looped lightly around his waist, doing most of the work if Jake was completely honest about it. The wound in Leon’s shoulder had closed up, but the new skin over it looked like a none-too-convincing patch. It was swollen and bruise-black, and it seemed to undulate with each breath Leon took as if liquid was sloshing around under the surface.

Leon struggled with the stairs, but made it up them more or less on his own. It wasn’t until they hit the porch that he stumbled. At first, Jake thought it was just his legs trying to give out on him, but then his body went rigid all over. He suddenly jerked upright, as if manipulated by a string that ran the length of his body. Then he collapsed forward, a violent jerking movement that was less like falling and more like being slapped down by a great hand.

He hit the rotten boards of the porch on his elbows and knees. A fresh gout of blood soaked the back of his shirt as the bruise on his shoulder split open. A raw, red protuberance of flesh showed for an instant in the hole, and then a tentacle erupted from the spot.

It was just a small appendage, less than a foot in length and neatly tapered to a fine point at one end. Small as it was, Jake got the distinct impression that it was just one finger on a much larger hand.

The tentacle whipped around stupidly, blindly, unaccustomed to the new roadmap of nerves and muscles currently rerouting its host’s body. Jake backed away from it. It didn’t seem like a threat, but it also didn’t seem like something he wanted to be anywhere near. It repelled him on a deep and visceral level, like the greasy brown exoskeleton of a cockroach.

Wesker did not move at all. He remained perfectly still at Leon’s side, observing the situation coolly. Then he knelt and seized the delicate limb near the tip, like he was grabbing a rattlesnake to milk it.

Setting his free hand on Leon’s back to steady him, he pushed the tentacle back into the gash in his skin. It fought him a little, bucking against his palm, but he guided it back under Leon’s shoulderblade and then eased a finger in after it to push it down.

Leon tried to push himself upright. He made a soft choking sound as the tentacle inside him slithered back into whatever burrow it had been hiding in. “Wesker?” he rasped.

Wesker discreetly slid his fingers out of the hole in Leon’s shoulder. The skin closed behind them.

“Did something happen?” Leon said blearily. He managed to raise himself to his knees, but he was having trouble keeping his balance. Wesker took him by the shoulders to steady him.

“Nothing happened,” Wesker said. “You lost consciousness for a moment, that’s all. We’re almost there.”

“Sure,” Leon said. His voice was little more than a raw whisper. “Sorry about that.”

Wesker took his arm and guided him to his feet. He led him through the crumbling front entrance of the mansion, leaving Jake to trail after them. Not that he cared, Jake told himself savagely as he stomped into the main hall.

The mansion had a big central staircase, over which had once hung a chandelier the size of a Hummer. The chandelier had fallen, probably a while back, and shards of crystal crunched under Jake’s boots with each step. The place smelled like mouse shit and mold.

“I believe there are still some private rooms in the west wing,” Wesker said. “You may rest, if you feel you need it. The medical facilities are on the second floor.”

“Shouldn’t I come with you?” Jake said. “In case something happens with him, I mean.”

“I am more than capable of handling any situation that may arise with regards to his condition,” Wesker replied primly.

“If that were true, he wouldn’t have gotten infected in the first place.”

Wesker’s eyebrows contracted, the vertical indentation between them deepening into a fissure. “That’s not the same thing.”

Jake sighed. “Look, I don’t know what you’re really getting out of this whole thing, but you’re obviously set on seeing it through. Just let me help already.”

“As you wish.” Wesker turned to go, then glanced back over his shoulder to say shortly, “If you want to help, you can assist me with the stairs.”

That had sounded like orders, and Jake snapped to attention. He came over on Leon’s other side and grabbed his bad arm. He was all but unresponsive now, his eyes hooded shut, mouth slack, breath coming wet and irregular. Except that when they pointed him towards the stairs, he moved smartly, taking each one in stride, like a good little automaton wound up and told which way to go.

If Jake was being completely honest, that freaked him out a lot more than whatever was slithering around under the flesh of Leon’s back.

Wesker seemed at home here, even after all this time. The lab he took them to was lined with white tile, rapidly graying under a patina of dust. It was filthy and cobwebbed, but not in disrepair. Jake hit the light switch, more out of habit than any expectation that the power would still be on after all these years, and he was surprised when a few of the overhead panels flickered to dim life.

“Hey,” he said, and then he hesitated. He honestly wasn’t sure how to address Wesker. To call him dad seemed intolerable, a bad joke at his own expense, but to just say his name didn’t seem right either. That name had been a specter looming over him for a long time now; it belonged to a cold shadow, not a human being. Not even something that was only almost a human being, as Wesker surely still was.

“Hey, old man,” he settled for at last. It was a little petty, but if the way Wesker’s shoulders ratcheted up was any indication, it had done the job Jake had intended it to do well enough. “Has someone else been here?”

“Reserve power,” Wesker told him.  “Stored in on-site batteries. Optimally, there should be several days’ worth, for security purposes.”

“You thought of everything.”

He watched Wesker hike Leon’s dead weight up onto a gurney that was fixed to the wall with a length of chain twined around the legs. When Leon’s shoulder hit the cold metal, he convulsed. Rictus gripped his body, shaping his fingers to into gnarled claws, forcing his back to arch until the vertebrae creaked.

Leon’s jaw tightened, and a noise leaked out from between his clenched teeth. Jake had expected it to be a whimper of pain – he could have handled pain – but instead it was a furious snarl, as if he were caging a beast inside him.

“Hush,” Wesker said. He laid a hand on Leon’s brow. Remarkably, Leon seemed to settle down a little under it. “It will not be long now. I will set everything to right.”

It was the most minimal of comforts, barely anything at all. And yet from the way Wesker lifted his head slightly after the words were out and cast surreptitious glances from beneath his lashes, Jake knew that for him even that much was a great deal indeed. It made that familiar thorn of bitterness that had been lodged beneath Jake’s ribs for as long as he could recall twist a little deeper. All the old pains felt fresh again, because Jake knew that when Wesker told Leon he would set everything right, he meant it, and when he had told Jake to forget the past, he had meant that as well.

Somehow, Leon had moved the immovable. In almost no time at all, against all common sense and in spite of everything the world knew of Albert Wesker, all it had taken was a few days of heavy exposure to Leon’s guileless and earnest charms to win him over. Leon had shown him mercy and compassion, and now Wesker would try mercy and compassion for himself, just to see what all the fuss was about.

In spite of how bad things looked, Jake still clung to the wild hope that Leon would pull through this in one piece. He wanted him to live at least long enough to find out what his pet project was really like.

Wesker withdrew to one of the cabinets of medical equipment. He selected some supplies, rooting through the stock to find the items that had survived the years of neglect. Rolling up his sleeve into an elegant cuff above the elbow, Wesker tied off a piece of rubber tubing around his bicep and then proceeded to draw so many vials of blood that Jake felt lightheaded just looking at it.

He lined the samples up on the counter like sentries. Every movement was brisk and efficient; Wesker was where he belonged now, in cold-minded pursuit of a goal. The only thing that had changed was that now he had cast himself in the role of hero. Or perhaps even that had not changed all that much from the old days.

“Looks like you got everything handled,” Jake said. His voice sounded as if it came from a long way off.

“You’re not staying after all,” Wesker replied. It was not a question, and it carried with it no note of surprise or disappointment.

“I figured I’d head into whatever the closest town is. You two are going to need changes of clothes, and I doubt this place has any food or water.” When Wesker didn’t reply right away, Jake added, “I’ll come back.”

“I had not thought that you wouldn’t,” Wesker said. He didn’t look away from the table. His hands were busy doing some fast, fine-threaded work, but when he spoke he didn’t sound distracted. “Leave your weapon there by the door.”

“You said it wasn’t going to come to that.”

“It won’t.” Wesker sighed. “But it may. So leave the gun with me. I still remember how to use one.”

Jake unholstered his handgun and left it on the counter. Then he dug the spare clip out of his jacket and laid it down beside the gun. With that accomplished, he hesitated a moment, looking down at the dark tableau they made on the stainless steel.

He spoke all at once. “I don’t know what went on between you two, but I believe that you won’t let anything happen to Leon if you can help it. Don’t think it means you’re a good guy now, or that I forgive you for any of it. I just want you to know, if he dies that’s not going to be why I hate you.”

Wesker didn’t answer, but Jake knew that he had heard him. It still didn’t feel quite right; it didn’t feel like enough, but it was the best he could do for now. He turned his back and left.

With the boy gone, Wesker felt himself relax into the task at hand, as if a part of himself were flowing out through his fingers and into the tools before him. He was comforted by the way his body took to the work, falling into familiar rhythms as if running along dilapidated but still functioning tracks.

This kind of sample collection and culturing was the sort of rote lab work they could have left to a trained chimp, and back in the days when he had worked for Umbrella it had often been passed off to lab assistants, who were plentiful and eager. Even then, Wesker had preferred to handle it himself, which had given him a reputation for perfectionism and mistrust that he had done nothing to dissuade and had in fact worn like a mark of pride.

The reality was that it had been neither of those things, but rather the relief that came from disappearing into his work. There had been a time when he could stand for hours with a single sample, not even looking up from the microscope. The viruses he had studied back then were the simplest organisms on the planet – not even alive in the strictest sense of the word. Just a few twists of genetic material inside a sheath of protein, and yet they were infinite in possibility and scope.

He remembered once watching, rapt, as a single diphtheria virus had latched onto a host cell and disgorged its contents. The tiny strands of DNA broke before his eyes, the scattered nucleotides spilling out in all directions. How pleasant it would be, he had thought back then, to just unravel out into space like that. How nice, to just disperse out into the infinite…

Wesker had been most content when he was alone amongst those transient and mutable forms, and if he hadn’t been content, then at least he had been peaceful. He might have been able to go on like that for a long time on momentum alone, but they had been determined to take even that from him.

The tiny shapes in the microscope field suddenly blurred and swam. Wesker leaned back long enough to pass his hand over his eyes. It came away damp, and he stared at it as if unable to understand why.

He knew what an inefficient, futile, and humiliating gesture it was, and he was ashamed of his tears. The sight of them unsettled him, the way lesser men grew faint when they saw blood. He knew he could not waste time crying when there was work to be done, and there was always important work to do.

But it troubled him, that weakness that had found purchase within him. He thought he had excised all such flaws of character decades ago, when he had undertaken the arduous process of rooting out all that was extraneous or vulnerable within himself. The future he had been able to envision even then, though it had been only a shimmer on the horizon at the time, held no place for such things.

Perhaps it was this building, and all the attachments it still held for him. He remembered when he had completed his studies and been allowed into the laboratory where his vocation would begin. How impressed he had been by all the fine minds, those names that had appeared so often in his reading. Men and women poached from higher education, from the military. There were those, too, who had been coaxed out of private libraries and hidden studies, just as he had been, and their names appeared in no literature but he had known from the first appraising glance that they were the ones he would have to beat.

Wesker remembered very clearly what he had thought in those days, intoxicated as he had been by the illusion of freedom. He had decided that he would live a life of the mind. It would be very pure, and dedicated solely to intellectual pursuit. To those looking in from without, it would seem an austere – indeed monkish – existence, but in truth it would afford him the greatest and most sensual of pleasures.

Back then, it had been enough. He could no longer say when or how that had changed; he could not get back to the moment when real life had intruded on the crystal cage he had constructed with his intellect, dragging with it all the rough and animal pleasures of the physical world.

For a moment, he thought he might be able to blame Aksinya Mueller. She had certainly played a part. From the tactile pleasure of sex to the sweet thrill of Uroborous moving through and within him, it seemed now a logical to transition from one to the other. But it was not Aksinya’s fault; she had hardly seduced him. Indeed, her presence in the wide gulf that stood between him and his ideal self was merely correlation, not cause.

Nothing was her fault. It could not be her fault, not even now, after she was dead and could no longer defend herself. She had thought that she could change him, and even in his naïve youth he’d had the good sense to feel embarrassed for her presumption and indignant that she might think there was something about him that was defective or faulty.

It hadn’t stopped him from doing what he did.

They’d always been safe, at least he thought that they had. It seemed absurd to him that he would not have taken precautions, but if he was honest with himself he could not remember exactly. Even now he could not say for certain whether Jake’s existence was an honest mistake beyond his control, or if he had somehow willed a child into the world through his own carelessness and vanity.

But Jake had not been the cause of that sudden and unsettling display of emotion. Not Jake, nor Aksinya.  Not even Leon, who was too long overdue for death to bother wasting tears on.

That left only himself, and the strange mixture of hope and trepidation he had felt when he found himself once more in the laboratory, preparing to put his hand to some worthy task.

It seemed the same as it always had. Engineering the virus and synthesizing the cure, there was no difference in the way it made him feel. But if that was true, then what of all he had fought for? What of his beautiful and terrible dreams?

He had wandered the wasteland for 20 years, only to find that he had never been more content than he was right here.

Wesker tore himself away for a moment and glanced over his shoulder. Leon had not moved much. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling with rapid, gulping breaths that seemed to do little to refresh him. Two knots stood out on either side of his jaw where it had locked shut, and little clouds of pinkish foam were lathered on his lips.

Though he looked bad, Wesker was relieved to see that he seemed to be unconscious. He was ashamed of the weakness he had unearthed within himself, and he didn’t want Leon to see him now. He would know everything at a glance, and even if he didn’t know, Wesker would tell him, just as he had told so many other futile and humiliating truths.  Somehow, Leon had surmised everything, with a wit stemming not from a profusion of natural intelligence, but rather learned from a lifetime spent in the service of other people’s whims.

Wesker felt a sharp, bitter stab of loathing. To think that a man like that could have survived this long, could even have thrived in this new world. For indeed, Wesker had known for a long time now that he no longer lived in the world of his youth. Something had changed after Raccoon City, not just in the people that had lived through those final days, but in those who had only watched it from afar. The consciousness of an entire nation had pivoted, but awkwardly, so that now it sat a little askew, no longer riding smooth upon the rails of destiny.

It was no longer a world in which men like Leon, with their ideals and selfless aberrations, should have been able to endure. And yet Leon had done more than endure; he had, in his own modest way, blossomed. True, he was an incorrigible drunk. He slept badly, and his great youthful strength and vigor had begun to fail him. But he was as well off as practically anyone, and better than most.

He was an invasive species, and his great well of compassion was as vestigial as legs on a fish. In a sudden flash of venomous insight, Wesker knew that he should let him die before his presence could further upset the careful ecosystem Wesker had constructed around and within himself.

Leon should have been allowed a painless death, persisting in the twin delusions that he was a hero and that Wesker was grateful to him. It was the logical and ecologically conscious thing to do, but Wesker knew even as he reasoned himself to the most rational conclusion that he could not let it come to pass. There was his professional pride to think of: he could synthesize a cure, and so he would. Not out of any sense of loyalty, or because he had made a promise. Not even because Jake had doubted his skill, though that was certainly part of it.

He would save Leon because he could no more shrink from a worthy task than Leon could have left him in Antarctica; he could no more uncleave himself from the work that only he was able to do than he and Leon could have cleaved together for more than a few stolen days at a time.

Wesker felt shaken, but outwardly he was calm as he turned back to his work. He felt he had swallowed whole the great dose of pity Leon had fed him, and he was only now getting around to digesting it. To do so completely would take still longer, but he didn’t have the time right now.

Under the lens, his white blood cells had begun their steady work. They had already flagged Leon’s strain of the virus as an invader and proceeded briskly to develop antibodies, like well-drilled soldier.

He could tell his own cells from Leon’s easily: his were strangely shaped, with curious forked receptors lining the exterior walls. They were abnormal, and viruses were unable to bond with them; when they tried they slipped right off the sides and into oblivion.

The lesson he had absorbed when he was very young, had been that those unique receptors made him a special case indeed, a step forward in human evolution. He had accepted that as absolute truth, and indeed felt that he had wasted many years convinced that he had been born great rather than that he must struggle every moment to achieve greatness.

After all, had his strange cells been stranger still, or even strange in a different way, they might have rendered the workings of his body hopelessly inefficient. He might have been stunted, anemic, slated for an early and ignoble grave. Far from the well-oiled machine that Umbrella had sought to hitch to its engines and exploit.

He had grown older, read voraciously, thought on the things he read and taken a secret and forbidden thrill from the thinking. In the end, he had concluded that he was not an absolute, as there could be no absolutes in evolution. His strange cells might have made him well-equipped to weather disease, but that only mattered when pestilence loomed.

Death by disease had seemed unlikely at the time, even quaint. After all, smallpox had been tamed and, at the time, AIDS was not even a whisper. It was the 1970s, the height of the Cold War, and it seemed far more likely that they would all just blow one another up in a fit of pique than that they would be conquered by some new plague. Little good natural immunity would do him when he was reduced to so many blackened bones or a photonegative scorch on a wall.

He was only remarkable in that his environment made him remarkable. Or, he had thought later, in that he might create an environment in which his remarkable traits could be recognized and useful. He was only an evolutionary miracle if the world was to again be threatened by plague. Knowing that, it had seemed the logical conclusion at the time that he must ride forth upon a white horse and bring pestilence back to the world.

All of this he had kept secret from his father and his father’s associated, never speaking of nor alluding to it almost out of instinct. The old men who ran the company and had overseen his education were philistines and buffoons. They knew nothing of theory and cared even less for it. They craved profit, and they had coddled Wesker because he could give it to them.

For a time, he’d had no choice but to work for them, for he had well-understood the consequences if he had not. They had taken the products of his labor, but he had not given them over out of a sense of duty, or gratitude.  Just as now he did not work for Leon’s sake, but worked tirelessly out of the hope that he might find, somewhere deep within the microscopic, a new world in which he at last belonged.

The scaffolding of time had grown unsteady, as it always did for Wesker when he was concentrating on some high intellectual labor. It had at once expanded and contracted, seemingly in the same instant, as if granting him an infinite number of hours to dedicate to his task and no one but himself by which to pace the work.

Denaturing was the process by which helixes of DNA were broken down into single strands. From there, they could be introduced to foreign strands and manipulated into new configurations. A rose could become blue, a fish could pulse with bioluminescence, a man could rise from the dead as something other than a man. And the antibodies that should have been Wesker’s alone could be bullied into cooperating with a stranger’s immune system.

Once the great restructuring was set in motion, it progressed quickly. Thousands of new hybrid white blood cells were ready within the hour. The finished solution was improvised and imprecise: anti-viral compounds to keep the T-virus from replicating further, antibodies to root out the mutated cells, and an infusion of Wesker’s own Uroborous-touched cells to heal the damage that had already been done to the living tissue.

It seemed inconceivable that it would work in its current state, and yet Wesker knew that it would work. That it must. It was the culmination of his research, the sum total of all he had learned over the years. The most and best that he could ever hope to be, contained in an ounce of cloudy liquid, inauspicious inside a syringe.

Wesker took the needle and approached Leon’s bedside.  He had thought that Leon was asleep, but as he came near he saw his eyes roll towards him. Leon’s pupils had contracted to pinpricks. The whites of his eyes were shot through with crimson threads. His skin was pale and waxy, like the underside of a mushroom, and beads of cold and livid sweat stood out on his forehead. His top lip peeled back from his teeth, which gave the illusion of being prominent and sharp as a wolf’s.

It seemed wrong for Wesker to put his hands on him when he was like this, as if touching Leon now would cancel out the way they had touched each other before. It was maudlin nonsense, arising from too little sleep and too much anxiety, and yet Wesker could not rid himself of the feeling. Those days they had spent at the cabin – more like hours, really – had been stolen out of time. There would not be another chance like that.

He took Leon by the shoulders and helped him sit up. Though his joints and his spine were stiff, he consented to be prodded. A faint pulse fluttered under Wesker’s hand, and he could feel the laborious rise and fall of Leon’s breathing. Awake through all of it, Wesker marveled, the whole drawn out and unglamorous process of dying.

The wound on Leon’s back had expanded to the size of Wesker’s palm. It was mottled red and purple, as wide open as the entrance to a cave. Wesker could see down past the skin, but not to the muscle and bone he had expected. Rather, the inside of the wound was black, as if there were nothing within but an empty space that went on indefinitely.

Without hesitation or sentimentality, without even a word to Leon, who probably would not have heard him anyway, Wesker reasoned, and would not have cared if he had heard, he punctured the syringe into the raw pink flesh that rimmed the site of infection. He administered the compound he had made to several points around the wound, then he withdrew his hand and he waited.

Wesker did not expect the cure to be as immediate and dramatic as the onset of the disease. In his experiences, tearing things asunder was always quicker and easier than putting them back together again. The way of all flesh was towards chaos, just as the way of all grand ideas was toward obsolescence and all great men towards ridiculous and pathetic old age.

All the same, he sat by the bed for a long moment and kept Leon’s body propped up against his arm. He watched the infected spot closely, as if waiting to see it heal before his very eyes.

He was exhausted, a sensation that, much like pain, he had thought he had forgotten. He stared at Leon without actually seeing him. His thoughts were all in disarray; they whirled senselessly and without a definite destination. He found himself going back over the same thing a dozen times – a sequence of genes he had cobbled together at the workbench, a few words Leon had said to him – without any idea of what he was supposed to make of it or where it might lead him.

Something stirred inside the wound on Leon’s back; the black emptiness for a moment showed pallid white. That caught Wesker’s attention. He forced himself to focus, and a moment later he caught a glimpse of it again. Something way down deep in the darkness was stirring up towards the light, like the bulk of some eyeless underground snake blundering its way onto the surface world where it had never belonged.

Wesker had only an instant to contemplate it before it began to struggle in earnest to free itself. The pale, thrashing tentacle that had once before abortively tried to escape its host now made a second break for freedom. It was larger now, as thick around as Wesker’s wrist, and the viral intelligence that drove it was one of determination and hot rage.

Leon coughed as the appendage shifted inside him, driving the air out of his lungs. A gout of blood flew from his lips. It would tear them both apart if it got free; Wesker knew that much.

He clamped his hand to the hole in Leon’s back, fitting his palm over it like a seal. He felt the thing inside butting up against him, trying to batter its way through, but he leaned forward, up against Leon’s back, bracing the last vestiges of his great strength against the instincts of the virus.

The tentacle struck him once, twice, in rapid succession. It felt like someone had taken a hammer to his palm, but Wesker didn’t even flinch. This was his creation. Leon’s body had played host to it, but it was not of Leon’s flesh. Wesker had made the virus what it was, in his first flush of youthful enthusiasm and inspiration, and now he knew that he must destroy it.  But he would not do so cringing and apologetic.

After the initial assault, the tentacle withdrew back inside Leon’s body. Wesker thought that it must have been feeling the effects of the antiviral compound, which explained its sudden and desperate attempt to escape the host body. Perhaps the drug was already taking hold, driving the beast back, destroying it in its very lair like one of those small hunting terriers trained to follow rats back into their holes and there throttle the life out of them.

That may very well have been the case, but the virus did not go easily. It was infinitely adaptable, which was almost like being infinitely clever. Somewhere down there in the darkness, it was already changing.

When it came back, battering itself a second time against Wesker’s hand, the seeking and striving appendage was tipped with an edged blade, like a straight razor. It struck at him once, rapidly, and Wesker was first aware of the sensation of his own blood coursing down his arm, long before he felt any pain.

His hand jerked back, an automatic movement. The tentacle slipped free, lashing about, wild but not random. The bladed edge slashed the last finger on his hand, sheering it off just below the second knuckle before embedded itself to the bone in his ring finger.

Wesker clapped his palm down over the tentacle, forcing it back under the skin. The stump of his finger jetted blood once, twice, and then slowed to a trickle. He looked around for the missing finger and spotted it, small and ridiculous, collecting dust on the filthy floor of the laboratory.

He couldn’t reach it from where he was, and he didn’t dare leave Leon to retrieve it. He stretched out his leg and cast about with his foot, trying to drag the finger closer, but it remained out of reach. Wesker was more annoyed than worried. The digit would grow back, and indeed he had lost more than that before and come out the other side little worse for the wear. But it was part of him, and he didn’t like the thought of it becoming food for the mice. It should have been given a proper burial, inside its own little cigar box coffin.

Jake would have to come back soon. Whatever he said, however he looked at them, no matter how he might sneer and pout, Wesker was determined that he would explain nothing to him, nor say a word to justify himself. He would simply tell Jake to pick up the finger and wash it off a little, and he would do it if he knew what was good for him.

Wesker could still feel the tentacle shifting beneath Leon’s skin, but it hadn’t attempted another assault. Instead of invigorating it, Wesker’s blood had cowed it into submission.

All the same, Wesker didn’t want to take any chances. He pressed up against Leon’s back, trapping his hand over the wound, between the bulks of their bodies. Though his finger had stopped bleeding, the gore was still warm as it soaked through is clothing. A lot of it had doubtlessly gotten into the wound in Leon’s back. Not the most sanitary way of practicing medicine, though Wesker supposed it wasn’t the first fluid they had exchanged.

He could barely remember it now. There had been one time on the sofa in the cabin. Another in the bed, though he supposed they hadn’t followed through on that. They both seemed as if they had happened ages ago, to another person in another country, and that Wesker had received the account second-hand, in a language he only half-understood.

He buried his face in Leon’s hair. It was stiff with blood, like a bundle of copper wire, but Wesker breathed against it and he moaned in a combination of miserable exhaustion and ecstatic relief.

Then, inconceivably, he slept.


	23. Chapter 23

The sensation of something stirring beneath his palm awakened him. Wesker had slept with his senses still attuned to the roiling and shifting of the creature inside Leon’s skin, and when he felt movement against his aching hand, reverberating up his stiff arm, he snapped awake. He was ready to do battle, even unto the death. He had resigned himself to it and he had no intention of repudiating his decision now.

But no attack was forthcoming, and Wesker realized that was not the creature tearing itself free of its host, not a spontaneous mutation that would consume them both in its birth throes. It was only Leon’s strained coughing as he came awake from a deep sleep.

Wesker straightened up. The hand that had been pressed against Leon’s back, pinned between their bodies was numb; it tingled when he moved it. His palm was stuck to Leon’s skin with a paste of dried blood, and when he separated them it was with a sound like paper being rent or dry leaves crushed.

He left a white impression of his hand, outlined in red, on Leon’s back, reminiscent of a cave painting at Chauvet. The handprint was missing a finger, and it took Wesker a moment to remember why. It took him a split second more to realize that the wound on Leon’s shoulder had completely disappeared, leaving behind not even a scar to mark its existence.

Leon twisted around so he could look Wesker in the face. His eyes were tired and still swollen with sleep, but there was no mistaking the bloom of health on his cheeks, the smoothness of an untroubled mind branded upon his brow.

He didn’t try to speak, which Wesker wondered about until he realized that he couldn’t think of a single thing to say either.

“How are you?” Leon asked at last.

“Well.”

“Yeah?” He smiled, wearily. “You look like shit.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I guess not.”

Leon hesitated, and he looked away, casting his gaze around the laboratory as if in search of something in particular. It settled at last on Wesker’s severed finger, stiff and blue on the tile floor.

It occurred to Wesker too late that he might try to hide his injured hand, as he would any other embarrassing defect, but by the time he thought of it, Leon had already grabbed his wrist and lifted it to inspect the hacked-off stump of his finger.

“What happened?”

“It’s fine.”

“That means it was something I did.” Leon frowned. “I don’t remember. I must have made a scene, though. I’m sorry.

“It’s good that you don’t remember.”

Leon shifted his hand, lacing their fingers together. “I don’t think that it is.”

“I brought you here,” Wesker told him abruptly, feeling like a child asking for a pat on the head. “I synthesized the anti-viral compound.”

“I know,” Leon said. “I knew that you would.”

Wesker was seized by the sudden impulse to pull away. He didn’t want Leon sitting so close to him, saying such things in complete confidence. Surely even he had known how tenuous the matter had been, even if he couldn’t remember the details.

In the end, he stayed where he was, but some of his misgivings must have shown on his face, or else Leon guessed at them, as he always seemed to be able to do. He reached up and clasped Wesker’s shoulder. It seemed an absurdly intimate gesture, the way he might touch a friend or a comrade in arms, not the way he touched a man whose life had intersected with his own by chance, for only a moment.

“You did a good thing,” Leon said. “You did good. Thank you.”

“You’ll live,” Wesker said, as if he hadn’t heard. “There should not be much risk of a relapse. Cellular damage was minimal, and by my observation it will repair itself with little direct intervention. Of course, it’s impossible to say without a CAT scan. The T-virus has mutated quite a bit since I last encountered it, but my antibodies still recognized it. We had a stroke of luck in that.”

He got it all out in one breath, and he had expected it to make Leon feel better. It certainly made Wesker feel better to say it, to have all the facts out in the open so that they could inspect them reasonably and logically. But when he looked back at Leon, he realized that he was watching him with a perplexed half-smile, and his hand had grown leaden on Wesker’s shoulder.

He was waiting for something else; he wanted something else. Wesker knew what it was, but he was damned if he was going to give it to him. He may have owed Leon his life, but he didn’t owe him _that_.

“It was Uroborous, wasn’t it?” Leon said. “That’s what you put in me.”

Wesker nodded. He supposed it had been obvious, but he hadn’t expected Leon to ask.

“Am I going to…?” Leon shook his head. “No. I won’t.”

Leon was looking right at him, his blue gaze steely and steady. The eyes were almost always where Uroborous manifested first, and Leon’s were clear, without the slightest abnormality or color variation. All was just as Wesker remembered.

“It doesn’t seem that way,” he said. “You do not show any of the classic symptoms. You would be demonstrating signs of infection by now if you were going to.”

Leon regarded him curiously for a moment more, then he patted Wesker on the shoulder and stood up. Wesker watched him carefully, ready to catch him if he seemed unsteady, but it turned out his concern was misplaced. Leon moved gracefully, light on the balls of his feet, carrying himself easier and with more assurance than he had even before he had been infected.

Wesker well-remembered that unflagging strength. He’d had it himself, once, and it had lifted him out of the ruins of Raccoon City and the detritus of his father’s empire, and it had inspired him to the remotest corners of the earth. And then, in the end, it had guided his hand as he had casually, systematically, squandered his immense talent on fantasies and phantasms.

Tentatively, Leon rubbed the back of his shoulder where his wound no longer was. He flexed the fingers on his injured hand, then bent his elbow up and back until he was satisfied that everything was in order. He had healed much faster than Wesker had anticipated. Faster, it appeared, than Wesker himself now healed, if the finger on his unwhole hand - still stubbornly refusing to regenerate - was any indication. Leon did not seem to have yet taken in the full significance of that, but Wesker had recognized it at once.

The blazing fire that had burned so hot within him for so long was at last going out. It had consumed itself, or, perhaps more accurately, it had finally gotten around to consuming all there was in him that was worthy of being burned. Perhaps there had not been a fire in a long time, only embers beneath ashes, giving the illusion of warmth.

All at once, Wesker felt very empty and alone, as if he actually were a structure gutted by a long-extinguished fire, a skeleton of broken and blackened timbers for a cold wind to howl through.

Uroborous would not want him again, not after what his body had been through.

“Leon,” he said abruptly, and there must have been something in his voice just then, because Leon looked up sharply, though not directly at him. He stayed facing away, but his gaze was fixed, steely, on some point in the distance that only he seemed able to see.

“I was afraid,” Wesker went on. It was not hard to admit it, but it made him feel defiant to say it aloud.

“Oh…” Leon replied.

“Afraid for you,” Wesker forced himself to add. “Not of you.” He couldn’t bring himself to look Leon in the eye. There was something else he feared. “Something has happened to me. Hasn’t it?”

Leon came over to sit beside him. He touched Wesker’s back, right at the fifth vertebrae, where a knot of muscle came together. The tension flowed away from his hand, relaxing beneath it.

“Something did happen,” Leon said quietly. “You can’t go back.”

“I can’t stay here.”

“I know,” Leon replied. “But just listen to me. Sometimes things happen and all you can do is adapt. You can adapt or you can die, and those are your only options.”

“Is that what you have done?”

“More times than I can count,” Leon said. “Christ, I’ve changed so much. You would have hated me if you’d met me twenty years ago, before all of this. I would have hated you, too.”

“That would have made things simpler,” Wesker said.

“A lot simpler. Everything was simple back then.” He smiled ruefully, and leaned his head on Wesker’s shoulder. “But I like you a lot now, so I guess there’s that.”

Wesker wanted to say that he liked him too, but he suspected it would be superfluous. Leon already knew, he was all but certain.

“Do you want to talk about what happened?” he settled for instead.

“What exactly do you mean? A lot’s happened and we should probably talk about most of it.”

“I’m referring to the infection,” Wesker said stiffly. “It can be traumatic. If you wish to talk, I’ll listen. In a medical capacity.”

“I appreciate it,” Leon said. “But I don’t actually want to talk about that. I don’t really do that kind of thing. In fact, I’m sort of relieved you found a way to make it all about you.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“I know, but I’m glad anyway.” Leon turned his head, enough to press a kiss to Wesker’s shoulder. “You could use a shower, you know.”

“So could you.”

“I could use a drink,” Leon replied. “I don’t suppose that’s where Jake went, is it?”

“He’s gone for supplies.”

“He’ll bring back cheap beer, if that.”

“There is a bar in the residential wing. As far as I know, it hasn’t been touched since the incident.” Wesker paused and tried to draw himself up to a dignified posture. “There are showers too.”

Leon fairly sprang to his feet, buoyed lightly and effortlessly on that wave of unnatural energy. Wesker felt no envy watching him, only a profound weariness. Leon reached back and took his hand – the unmangled one – and hauled Wesker to his feet.

“Come on, old man.”

“Now that is becoming a little too familiar,” Wesker said, but he submitted to Leon’s prodding and fussing as they left the lab and crossed the ruined foyer.

“I bet this place was something in its day,” Leon said.

“Jake called it tacky, I believe.”

Leon shrugged. “He grew up in Eastern Europe.”

“Aksiniya Mueller always had exceptional taste.”

Leon glanced back at him, startled. His expression was curious enough that Wesker felt blood rush to his face.

“What?” he snapped.

“Nothing,” Leon replied, making an exaggerated show of innocence. “I’ve just never heard you talk about anyone that way.”

“What way is that?” Wesker said through gritted teeth.

“Nicely. Complimentary.”

“I give compliments when they are well-deserved.”

Leon led the way into the residential wing of the mansion. “Name one other person you’ve complimented since we met.”

“Socrates.”

Leon laughed. “You make for a pretty tough crowd.”

Wesker ignored him. “Through here,” he said, indicating one of the discreet oaken doors that lined the corridor. Within was a private apartment. Leon started toward the shower, but he paused before he’d made it more than a few steps and looked back expectantly. It took Wesker a moment to realize what he wanted, but when he finally did he glanced away. Feeling better indeed, he thought.

“There is probably water left in the pipes,” he said. “But it won’t be warm.”

“Ah,” Leon replied. “I’ll take another raincheck, then.”

He disappeared into the other room, and a moment later Wesker heard the water running. He moved about the room, touching with his eyes and then with his fingers all the items he had once thought of as his own. He opened the closet and found three suits lined up on the bar, folded and pressed so neatly that even after two decades there was still a crease in the trousers.  Wesker took them out and removed the dry cleaner’s dust-caked plastic. He kept the black for himself and saved the navy blue for Leon, returning the chocolate brown to the closet where it could languish with the rest of the mistakes of the 1990s.

Leon returned soon after, shivering and blue but largely invigorated. He dried his hair on a towel that looked like it was held together by cobwebs and dust.

“That wasn’t as nice as I’d hoped it would be,” he said. “There was a lot of blood, though.” He fixed Wesker with a strange, piercing look. “Was that all my blood?”

Wesker shook his head. “Not all of it.”

Leon looked like he wanted to say more, but Wesker brushed past him and closed the bathroom door. It was cold when he stripped out of his stiff and stained clothing, downright freezing when he stepped under the icy water. He remembered that he never used to notice the cold. That had not been a symptom of Uroborous, which was notoriously cold-blooded, shunning any environmental factors that forced it to draw upon the host body’s energy reserves. No, Wesker himself had brought that resilience to cold and physical discomfort to the union himself, like a dowry for the virus to evaluate when deciding whether or not to accept him.

He certainly felt the chill now, as he scrubbed scales of dried blood off his skin and combed his fingers through his hair so that the water that dripped off of it ran red. Red, too, swirled around his feet and mixed with the fingers of rust that stained the bottom of the shower so that he couldn’t tell if he’s managed to get much of the filth off at all.

Shivering, he got out, and he dressed mechanically, his numb fingers going through the motions of doing up his cuffs and straightening his jacket so it lay flat over his hips.  The suit fit him pretty well, just a little tight through the waist, no longer perfectly tailored through the shoulders. Not bad at all, though. Not with twenty years gone by.

Wesker was still trying to arrange the collar of his suit jacket when he stepped outside. Leon was waiting for him, and he sprang to his feet and thrust one of a pair of whiskey tumblers into Wesker’s hand. There was about a half inch of gold liquid in the bottom, untouched. Leon had been waiting to drink his, but he was clearly running short on patience.

“What’s this?” Wesker said.

“Scotch,” Leon answered. “I found it on the sideboard over there.”

He paused to drink, finishing the glass in a single swallow. “It’s about a hundred years old, if you believe the label. Probably meant to be savored.”

He poured himself another glass while Wesker sipped the first. Leon was right, it was a drink meant to be reveled in, but he barely tasted it now. He only felt the heat of it, moving rapidly down his esophagus. It was like some vital nutrient his body craved.

Leon drank his second glass as quickly as the first, and only then was he looking at Wesker and really seeing him. “You look good like that,” he said. “By the way.”

Wesker ran a hand over the lapel of the suit. “I ought to. It was mine.”

“Really?”

“Back then.”

Leon’s lips quirked into a tiny smile. “It still fits you.”

“Not exactly.”

“So I guess this place…” Leon said, looking around the room as if entering it for the first time.

“It was somewhere I stayed for a while.”

“Not a home?”

“No, not really a home.”

“I wouldn’t have liked to live here,” Leon said. “It feels a little forbidding. Like it’s a room in some not particularly welcoming hotel.”

“I’ll start a fire,” Wesker replied. There was still some wood in the grate that could be used to get one going. Wesker kindled it, aware the whole while of Leon watching over his shoulder with the practiced eye of someone who had made many wholesome campfires in his life. Wesker wondered if he was disappointed, then, by the cleverly concealed gas jet in the back of the fireplace.

The fire sprang to life at a touch of his hand. As he straightened up, he felt Leon move closer, close enough to brush against his arm.

“I guess Jake will be back soon?”

“He must be.”

“Should we call him?”

“I think he will be all right on his own.”

“What did you two talk about? Anything?”

“The past,” Wesker said. “It was enlightening.”

Leon sighed. He finished his third glass of scotch and then set the empty tumbler on the mantle and came back to Wesker’s side. “This is really bad this time, isn’t it? I’m tired of running already…”

“They don’t want you,” Wesker told him. “You can walk away, and your former employers will be more than willing to maintain the polite fiction that you had nothing to do with it.”

“I know.” Leon sighed. “But I’d worry about you.”

“You’re a gentle soul,” Wesker said. “But you’re totally irrational.”

“I don’t want to let anyone else down.”

Wesker narrowed his eyes. He stepped away from Leon so he could crouch down by the fire and hold his hands out to the flames as if to warm his numb fingers. In fact, he seemed not to feel the heat at all. “You’ve already done more than I ever asked you to.”

“Oh…” Leon said, sounding hurt.

Wesker set his jaw and pressed on. He kept watching the fire, as if addressing it. “You’ve done more than I deserve. You are more than I deserve.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Am I incorrect?”

Leon sighed. “I guess not. You’re not exactly a nice hapless guy who just made a couple of mistakes, are you? But you’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met, and that counts for something too. Maybe you don’t deserve a slap on the wrist, but you also don’t deserve that lab where I found you.”

Wesker shivered, and he felt Leon’s hand come down on his shoulder.

“No one deserves that,” Leon said. “Listen, whatever you decide, I’m glad you helped me out when I needed it. Wherever you end up, I’ll be rooting for you.”

Wesker reached up and touched the hand on his shoulder, trailing the tips of his fingers over the back of Leon’s wrist. He was surprised by how good it felt, the warmth of another person’s skin against his own, and he took his hand away so he could rub his cheek against Leon’s wrist instead.

Leon seemed a little surprised, not unpleasantly so. His free hand came down to stroke Wesker’s hair, but Wesker had already turned and pressed a dry kiss to the inside of Leon’s wrist. He pivoted in place, turning so he no longer had his back to Leon but instead knelt facing him. His hands went to the button of Leon’s suit pants, working them open.

“Whoa,” Leon said, startled. “Hey.”

Wesker kept his eyes lowered, resolving to ignore any further complaints. He was tired of talking, which didn’t seem to get them anywhere. It was time for action. He slipped a hand into Leon’s pants, wrapping it around his cock.

Leon sucked in a sharp breath through clenched teeth. He shuddered in Wesker’s grip, hard and straining against his hand almost immediately. Delicately picking Leon’s shirttails out of the way with his free hand, Wesker eased his cock free and guided it to his mouth. He parted his lips only as far as he had to, letting the shaft slide down his throat with practically no resistance at all.

Somewhere above him, he heard Leon catch his breath. It was a sharp, strangled gasp for air, as if he had been struck full in the stomach. His fingers threaded into Wesker’s hair where they clutched hard but did not dare to pull him closer. Wesker leaned against him all the same, so that the head of Leon’s cock butted up against the back of his throat, choking him. It sent a jolt of pain through him, and only then did it feel like it counted for something. He groped up Leon’s solid thighs to his hips, his fingers dipping beneath the tails of his shirt to brush against the bare skin of his flanks. It felt intimate, stolen, those brief instances of skin against skin, and Wesker found his staggering, half-disordered thoughts returning to them time and again, even as he shifted on his knees, finding a better angle so he could take Leon in deeper, all the way to the hilt.

He could hear Leon making soft, undignified noises as he worked his tongue against him. The pulse that beat against the inside of his throat was high-toned, erratic, and yet it seemed to throb in counterpoint with his own. Though Leon said nothing, Wesker knew when he was about to come, and he stayed down, letting it spill down the back of his throat.

For a split-second, he felt warmth in his chest. A flower of fire that bloomed and died almost in the same instant, as the long-dormant Uroborous in his body stirred in recognition of the virus in Leon’s. They called to each other, blood to blood, a single soft note that faded away as soon as it had been formed.

Wesker kept his head down, nursing the empty space inside him where he had felt that old, familiar heat. He had almost forgotten Leon was there until he felt his fingers moving through his hair, caressing the side of his face.

“Shit, Wesker. What the hell was that for?”

Wesker composed his expression and then got to his feet. He tried to move away, but one of Leon’s arms was around his waist and his other hand was pressed against his chest, holding a handful of Wesker’s shirt and wrinkling it hopelessly.

Leon dragged him down and kissed him, to which Wesker was slow to respond. When he drew away, there was a perplexed and wounded look on Leon’s face.

“Sorry,” Wesker said. “I was thinking about something.”

Leon laughed incredulously. “About what? How to give a gold star blowjob?”

Wesker lowered his eyes in a fair approximation of modesty.

“I’m serious,” Leon said. “Where’d you learn to do that? You really are good at everything.”

“It was nothing,” Wesker said quietly.

“My legs are still shaky. I need to sit down.” He took hold of Wesker’s collar and dragged him along as he took one step back, then two. He all but collapsed on the bed, sending up a cloud of ancient dust. Wesker pushed him back and he felt Leon give before him, toppling over onto his back so Wesker could crawl over him, parting his thighs so Wesker could settle between them. It was a gesture of abject surrender that was familiar by now.

Wesker propped himself up on his elbows so he could look down into Leon’s face. His eyes looked vague and misty, and there was a stupid grin plastered across his lips.

“It couldn’t have possibly been that good,” Wesker said.

“It was probably better.”

Wesker kissed him. He felt Leon’s legs flex against his hips in anticipation, the stiff bulge of his cock digging into his thigh. Hard again already, Wesker thought, not without a little pang of jealousy. Whatever his antiviral cocktail had done, it had given Leon a last little taste of adolescence when he least expected it.

“Let’s get this done before Jake shows up,” Leon all but giggled. “That kid’s therapy bills are high enough already.”

“You worry about him too much,” Wesker said.

“Someone’s got to,” Leon said. I pulled Wesker down impatiently and kissed him. “Someone’s got to worry about all the damn stupid kids in the world.” His hands went to Wesker’s belt, working it open. “Someone has to worry about their damn stupid fathers, too.”

He pushed Wesker away long enough to work his pants down over his hips. Wesker felt a momentary sting of cold, but then Leon dragged him back down into a private furnace of body heat. He unbuttoned Wesker’s shirt and shucked if off, then started on his own. His hands were as swift and steady as they might have been if he were reloading on the fly. He hadn’t been sure before, Wesker realized, but this time he knew exactly what he wanted and all that was left was to follow it through.

But once he’d gotten through the urgent business of ridding them of their clothes, Leon slowed down considerably.  He stroked his palms over Wesker’s chest, moving with agonizing leisure as he traced the contours of his muscles, as if molding his hands to Wesker’s body.

Wesker, of course, had been naked before him in the past. He hadn’t been ashamed of it in the lab, when his body had betrayed and abased him, and he certainly wasn’t going to be embarrassed now. But there was something different about the way Leon looked at him this time. There was a ravenous hunger mixed in with the awe and intimidation, a sharpness in his eyes that Wesker could neither ignore nor blunt.

“What do you want to do?” Wesker asked, half-hoping to hurry him along.

“Just relax,” Leon replied. “I’ll get there.”

His exploring fingers reached Wesker’s hips, and one drifted over to ply along his cock. He didn’t stroke it properly; he only ran his hand along the, first the palm then the backs of his knuckles, teasing him.

Wesker’s breath caught in his throat and came out in a shuddering exhale. “I thought you wanted to hurry,” he said.

“I’m getting to it.” Leon made a tantalizing half-circle with his hand wrapped around the shaft. He tilted his head, planting an uneven line of kisses along Wesker’s throat, over the point of his jaw, up to the sensitive hollow behind his earlobe. “You sound like you want me to hurry,” he said, muffled.

Wesker shut his eyes and saw a galaxy of stars in the darkness behind his closed lids. His fingers, still less one on the right side, clenched in the dusty bed sheets, sending a little jolt of fresh pain through his hand. “Yes,” he said. “Just hurry.”

He felt like he had lost something in the whispered plea, forfeited it in Leon’s favor, irreversibly and irreconcilably. Wesker no longer cared. Leon already had the best of him; a little more wouldn’t change much.

Leon closed his hand around him firmly and began to stroke him again. They were pressed up against each other, so close that Wesker could feel the muscles in Leon’s arm winding and unwinding with each jerk of his fist.

“Is that good?” Leon hissed, his breath sharp against Wesker’s ear.

“It’s good,” Wesker admitted.

It was more than that, though. Wesker’s head spun, and the flickering light of the fire created a strobing illusion. When Wesker let his head fall back so he could see the room, all the old furniture and fixtures were familiar and yet at the same time utterly alien.

He came with a jerk of his hips, a moan that he tried to choke back. Leon made a little sound low in his throat, as if surprised. While Wesker caught his breath, Leon turned on his side and stretched out next to him.

Leon watched him for a moment, taking in his still profile. “Stop that,” he said at last.

“What?”

“Overthinking things.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t, but I could see it in your eyes.” Leon shifted closer, draping an arm over Wesker’s waist in one of those casual gestures of affection that seemed almost second-nature to him. “Just relax. Nothing is going to go wrong in the next thirty minutes.”

“At this rate, nothing is going to be accomplished, either.”

“We’re waiting for Jake,” Leon reminded him, stroking his chest. “Whatever happened between you two, he’s on our side.”

Wesker gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to listen to this, and he didn’t have to. He could have gotten up and pulled on his clothes and walked out, leaving the whole convoluted and pitiful business behind him.

In the end, though, he didn’t move, save to shift a little closer to Leon. “Don’t talk to me about that boy,” he said.

“Sure,” Leon replied. “Whatever you want.”

“Don’t talk to me about any of it.”

“You don’t want me to talk at all?” Leon said, clearly unimpressed.

“Just stay here,” Wesker said. “Stay with me. I want to know exactly where you are.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for character death in this chapter. If you want to know details before you read, scroll to the end of this page for spoilers.

Sherry wasn’t sure what woke her, but when she opened her eyes it was pitch black. Her first impression was one of falling, or floating. Of being cut loose, weightless, as if she had been abruptly untethered and left to float in the ravenous void of space.

The sensation ceased abruptly, when Sherry realized that her head and slipped off the backpack she had been using as a makeshift pillow and was now wedged uncomfortably against the barracks floor. Slowly, Sherry sat up. The blanket slipped away from her shoulders and the cold pressed in to replace it.

Siberia, she remembered, not without a sense of wondrous regret at her own ability to get herself into situations like these. Sometimes she had the distinct feeling that for all her affectations of carefulness and rigorous attention to detail she was actually incurably reckless at heart. It wasn’t just coincidence that she’d ended up here, and there was no sense denying the thrill of excitement she had felt when she had heard about this clandestine mission, the surge of joy in her heart when her plane had touched down in the wilderness of the snowfields with no help in sight.

She had been waiting for something like this all along, searching for it and courting it almost without being consciously aware of what she had been doing. She’d left Jake for it, risked what they had. Maybe it had even been worth it. Getting the data on the W Initiative had been her duty, and she knew that she had performed it admirably. But duty was not all there was to it.

All at once, Sherry felt she had to see the files again. She reached into the front pocket of her backpack and fished about for her phone. It wasn’t where she had left it. Scowling against the cold, she kneeled up and begin to search the floor nearby. She found nothing.

More annoyed than worried, she pulled a flashlight the size and shape of a primary school kid’s pencil case out of her bag. Flipping it on, she checked the floor near her bed, carefully and systematically moving her pack, flipping back the tails of the blankets. There was nothing there.

It still hadn’t occurred to Sherry to be worried. She pushed back on her knees and mentally retraced her steps. It always helped her find the things that had gone missing at home. But it was as she straightened up that she realized she hadn’t heard any sound from the other side of the room. She had made enough noise in her search to rouse Manuela from sleep, and the flashlight was plenty bright. Still, she hadn’t heard any sounds of protest, or of a body attempting to shift away from the light.

Sherry glanced toward the other bedroll and when she found it empty her chest constricted. She swung the light back towards the door of the barracks. Though she was sure it had been closed when she went to sleep, it was open now. A sliver of impenetrable darkness from the hallway showed where the door had gapped away from the frame.

It could have been anything, and yet Sherry had the unshakable feeling that it was one very specific thing. She didn’t want to believe it, and she told herself that her residual dislike for Manuela was getting to her, making her assume the worst. All the same, she wished she had not abandoned her knife back in the server room as she climbed to her feet and went out into the hall.

All was still, and shrouded in disorienting darkness, such that the beam of Sherry’s flashlight seemed not even to penetrate it. She had the uncanny sensation of having been marooned in a pool of light that she did not dare step out of for fear of not being able to find her way back.

Eventually, her eyes adjusted. It was the same hallways as it had been during the day. The windows were frosted over, but they still allowed in a diffuse white wash of moonlight. After a few seconds, she could see more clearly. When she looked down, she could make out boot prints in the dusting of frost on the ground, leading away.

Pitching the beam from the flashlight down and shielding it with her hand to conceal it somewhat, Sherry followed the prints. They led her back to the interior of base, down the stairs she had descended earlier that day to get under the permafrost. Though the door to the server room was pulled closed now, she could see a little slip of light peering out from beneath it.

Sherry wasn’t sure if she should attempt stealth. She was still half-convinced that everything could be resolved with the right words. Whatever was driving Manuela now, maybe she would give it up once Sherry caught her at it. It would not survive the embarrassment of being uncovered and laid bare.

Slowly, she pushed the door open. Manuela was standing over the terminal in the center of the room, and she did not turn around when Sherry came in.

“What are you doing?” Sherry asked, sounding considerably more irritable than she had intended.

Manuela did not reply. From where she stood, Sherry could see the regiments of green text on the screen but she couldn’t make out any details. She came forward a few steps, but cautiously. The dead hunter was still stretched out on the floor, and Sherry, who had seen plenty of death in her day, felt suddenly superstitious about stepping over it. She didn’t call out again, but after a few seconds, Manuela straightened up and turned around.

“It’s gone,” she said.

“What is?”

“I erased it all,” Manuela went on. Her lips, bluish from the cold, curved into a grim smile. “Now they can’t use it to control us. They can’t use it to hurt anyone ever again.”

“You deleted the data,” Sherry surmised. She said it without thinking of what it must mean, and she was careful to keep it that way. If she started thinking about consequences now, the fear would paralyze her. “The W Initiative. Everything.”

“I did it for you,” Manuela said. “One day, you will realize that.”

“Where’s my phone, Manuela?” Sherry said carefully.

Manuela reached into the pocket of her parka and pulled out the device. She held it up so Sherry could see. “I didn’t know your password. I thought maybe you’d want a chance to save your contacts.”

“I do,” Sherry said. “Thanks.”

She stretched out her hand to take the phone. She hadn’t expected Manuela to actually hand it over, but when she did Sherry didn’t hesitate. Tucking the phone in close to her chest, she lowered a shoulder and butted Manuela hard in the sternum, knocking her back. Then she turned and bolted for the door.

Her training had kicked in admirably, and in spite of everything, she felt swift and sure on her feet. She remembered the layout of the facility, and she knew right where she was going. But as she reached the corpse of the hunter laid out in the center of the room, Sherry felt an iron grip tighten around her upper arm.

Manuela jerked her back, with a savage, vindictive strength that Sherry had not accounted for. “I thought you understood,” she said in a voice that was half furious and half plaintive. “I thought we were the same.”

Sherry had no idea what could have given Manuela that idea. She would have said as much, but it was at that moment Manuela’s scarred forearm wrapped around her throat.

Beyond the scorched and blackened edges of her parka, Manuela’s burns bubbled like miniature lava lakes. Occasionally one of them erupted in a small shower of molten blood that briefly through sparks in the cold air and stung like popping grease against Sherry’s cheeks.

There was no time to worry about that, as Manuela tightened her grip, squeezing Sherry’s windpipe shut. She felt a rush of blood at her temples, an unbearable pressure at the back of her eyes, as if her skull were about to burst into fragments.

Sherry didn’t dare loosen the hold on the phone she had just recovered, but she got her free hand up and around Manuela’s arm, digging her nails in to the delicate skin. Blood beaded around her fingertips and fell in tongues of molten fire.

Together they pitched forward a step, off-balance. Sherry’s world was dark around the edges and growing shadowier by the moment. Her toe caught on the edge of the hunter’s body, still shrouded in plastic, and Sherry toppled over it, dragging Manuela after her.

They landed on top of the hunter, and for a moment Sherry’s senses were flooded with the putrid smell of rot. Gagging, she elbowed Manuela away and rolled off the body.

Sherry hit the ground hard, knocking the little wind she had left out of her in a pitiful sigh. Her head cracked against the concrete floor. Though she didn’t think she had lost consciousness, her vision narrowed to a single pinprick of gray light and her ears filled with a sound like being covered by the sea.

It took a second to recover, and when she had regained her senses Sherry was pleasantly surprised that she had senses left to regain at all. She thought Manuela would have taken the opportunity to throttle the life out of her.

Slowly, since her head felt like it had suddenly ballooned in size, Sherry sat up. Manuela was a few feet away, on the other side of the corpse, tangled in the plastic, half-bowed over herself. Her hands were cinched around her midsection, and little ribbons of blue flame licked from between her fingers.

It had happened when they had fallen, Sherry realized. Manuela had landed on the hunters claws. They were still sharp, and they still cut deep.

All at once, Manuela jerked her head up and met Sherry’s eyes. She made a sound, and not one of pain.

They both moved at once then. Manuela got to her feet, hurdling over the corpse between them. Sherry pushed herself back, sliding a little on the slick floor. She shoved the phone into the pocket of her parka, forcing her frozen fingers to uncramp and release it.

Manuela nearly caught her on the stairs, but her blood-slick hand slid off Sherry’s shoulder and Sherry hurdled up the steps ahead of her. She remembered that the cold slowed Manuela down, and so she headed for the hatch that led outside.

She had lost her flashlight somewhere, but there was enough moonlight slatting in through the windows that Sherry could find her way. Manuela was still behind her, but moving considerably slower now. When she called out, her voice was rough and weathered, as if she had to work to make the words, as if she had been working at them for a long time.

“Do you think they’ll actually be grateful to you for this? Do you think that they will see you as anything more than a monster to be muzzled or a tool for them to use? If you actually believed that, Sherry, then I would be able to forgive you…”

Sherry didn’t hear the rest. She had thrown her shoulder against the exterior hatch and it had swung open and spilled her into the snow.

The cold was instantaneous, like a fist tightening around her. She could feel it crackling in her lungs when she breathed in, and her head began to throb as if she had just bitten into something frozen.

Sherry forced herself to get up and get moving. Cold as it was for her, it would be colder for Manuela. Sherry was hoping that would at least give her a shot.

She headed for the snow dunes they had crossed on the way here. Trudging through the drifts was hard going, and soon her breath was coming heavily and her pulse was pounding in her ears. Otherwise, all was still and silent. Sherry had the horrible feeling of having underestimated Manuela’s determination to get the data from her. Perhaps she was even now sealing the hatch, locking Sherry out so that she might retrieve the phone from her frozen corpse in the morning.

Half-stricken with the thought, Sherry risked a glance over her shoulder. The hatch still stood open, and just inside it a shadow was cast in relief by the light of the moon. She recognized the shape at once as Manuela, but in the dim light she seemed somehow crooked and off-kilter. As Sherry watched, she stepped out into the snow and broke into a run.

Something was wrong in the way she carried herself. Her strides covered too much ground, as though she glided atop the snow rather than sinking into it. As Sherry tried to reconcile the illusion, Manuela pitched abruptly forward onto all fours. Her torso stretched grotesquely, and she went on running, not missing a stride. Running swift over the snow like a big cat, or a wolf.

She was mutating. Right now, before Sherry’s very eyes, she was changing. The virus inside her had at last come awake, and it was more than making up for lost time.

Sherry put her head down in to the snow and sprinted. She couldn’t outdistance Manuela, not moving like she was, but she still might think of something. There was nothing but miles of flat and open snow-covered ground in all directions, but, Sherry told herself, she might think of something yet.

She started to climb one of the rolling snow dunes that ringed the base. It was steep, and the snow that had slid down it from the windward side was powdery and refused to cohere. Each step she took sank in to the ankle and had to be wrenched free. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. Manuela was somewhere back there, gaining on her rapidly. She could see in the dark now, Sherry somehow felt certain, and her teeth were long and gleaming.

No hot breath came on the back of her neck, though Sherry almost wished that it would. All she could feel was the oppressive cold and all she could hear was the Arctic wind whipping in her ears. At the top of the dune, she stepped in a deep drift and abruptly sank into the snow to her knees.

Something solid and sharp brushed against her shin, like a tiny fish with razor fins darting against her leg. Sherry remembered the barbed wire buried under the snow out here, and when she looked down, yes, there was a single ridge of rust-reddish spines visible above the surface of the snow.

Sherry tried to pivot to the side to keep from stepping in the coil. Her foot caught and she felt the joint of her ankle roll sickeningly. Then she was falling. She hit the ground on her side, throwing up a shower of snow that uncovered a snarl of barbed wire, one corner of a massive thicket lying just under a dusting of white powder.

She missed falling in to it by less than an inch, but then she went over the crest of the dune and felt a sickening drop as she began to slide down the oppose side.

The ground was more ice than snow here, whipped into a kind of frozen glass by the wind. Sherry tried to catch herself, but when she dug her heel in a sudden jolt of pain ricocheted through her ankle. She hit a ridge of rock, bounced off it, heels-over-head, and then finally, mercifully, came to rest in a pile of snow at the foot of the dune.

She was dazed. Her boots and coat were full of snow. Slowly, she slipped one half-frozen hand into the pocket of her parka and touched the phone there. It seemed to be in one piece.

Dulled by the cold, her survival instincts were slow to kick in. It took what seemed a long time to realize that she needed to get up, keep moving. She struggled to her feet, but when she tried to put weight on her right ankle, it simply folded beneath her, dumping her back in the snow.

Sherry yelped in pain as she hit the ground, and before her cry had faded a new voice took it up. Manuela had just crested the dune behind her, letting loose a blood curdling screech. Something like a wolf, but shriller. Like a bat, but with a wet gurgling mixed in.

Without wanting to, Sherry glanced back. She saw the thing that had once been Manuela silhouetted in the silvery moonlight. Its limbs had grown long and twisted; its torso was crooked and malformed. But it was fast, yes, and hungry.

It bounded forward, and all at once its triumphant cry twisted into a shriek of surprise and rage. Something seemed to jerk it back, mid-leap, and the creature turned over and balled up on itself, kicking its limbs furiously.

Benumbed by the cold, Sherry was slow to comprehend it. Then the creature reared back so that once again it cut a sharp outline in the moonlight. Coils of barbed wire garlanded its malformed limbs. With that final leap, it had landed directly amid the buried thicket.

It screamed as it went over again, dragged down by the heavy wire. The air around it began to shimmer, like waves of heat drifting off the pavement in the summer. Manuela was bleeding from dozens of cuts now, and as her blood came in contact with the air it threw sparks that sputtered and smoked on the frozen ground.

All at once, a pillar of flame erupted into the night sky. It drove before it a rush of hot wind and a trickle of melted snow water. And from within the fire, a scream so wrenching it seemed almost like a physical presence, a fist driven into Sherry’s solar plexus, forcing the air out of her so that all she could do was stare in mute and benumbed horror.

The cry went on and on, a single, sustained note that spiraled up into the cold, clear Arctic night. It might have gone on for hours for all Sherry knew; she had stepped completely out of time. It was not a sound of pain or fear, only rage at the horrible injustice of what had been done.

All at once, the scream broke off. The creature that had once been Manuela reared up once more. The shape it made against the flames was without definition or form. It was just a mass of writhing limbs, momentarily coaxed to stand out stock-straight, stretched to their full and impossible lengths.

Then, without another sound, the shape collapsed over on its side. When it hit the snow, the flames abruptly flickered and went out, but a plume of thick, black smoke continued to drift upward from the spot where it had fallen.

Sherry didn’t move for a long time. Only when the water that had spilled down the dune and pooled around her began to freeze once again did she struggle to her feet. Her right ankle was still reluctant to take her weight, so she crawled and hopped and hobbled back up the dune.

She had to pass the spot where Manuela had burned, but she didn’t dare look at what was left of her.

Once she was on the other side of the dune, out of the wind, walking was easier. She started back towards the compound. Her ankle was swollen into a massive knot inside her boot, but she found that it could take her weight for a few steps at a time.

The going was slow, but the stark knowledge that she would freeze if she stopped kept her moving. Finally, she hopped up the three stairs that led to the facility’s exterior hatch and all but collapsed in the hall.

With fingers that burned from frostbite, she pulled the phone out of her pocket and flipped it open. She breathed a sigh of relief when she found that all the data on the W Initiative was still there, right where she had left it. Once she saw that it was safe, Sherry was seized by a sudden nagging urge to turn over on her side and go to sleep right there. The data was safe, and the rest could surely wait for the morning.

She struggled against the sudden languor, marshaling herself back under control. If she fell asleep now, she almost certainly wouldn’t wake up.

With shaking hands, she punched in the only number she could think of to call. The phone seemed to ring for hours.

At last, Jake picked up. “Yeah?” he said. He hadn’t recognized the number.

“Jake?” Sherry asked. Her voice seemed small, fading.

There was a pause, then Jake said, “Babe?”

Sherry breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t known until that moment that she had been afraid of what Jake would do. “It’s me.”

“Are you okay?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” Sherry said. “I think so. A little cold.” Jake didn’t say anything right away, so Sherry pressed on, to fill the silence that threatened to become awkward. “What about you?”

“Honestly? Not great,” Jake said. “Look, babe, I know this is probably a bad time, but I could really use some help with something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings, continued from the top of the page: Manuela dies in this chapter. It's a fairly gruesome and bloody sequence, but in a fun Resident Evil way rather than a gross depressing way, I hope. Still, if that's not something you particularly want to read you might want to skip this one.


	25. Chapter 25

For all that Wesker had dreaded being dragged back into that sterile lab where they would complete the disassembly of his body, he had not thought himself so fatalistic that he had given it up as an inevitability. However, when he did find himself back in that stainless steel tomb, his first thoughts were not of surprise, nor of terror, nor even of wonder as to how they had managed to take him so peacefully, stealing over him in his sleep, like death.

All of those emotions came later, in due time, but not before a flood of acceptance – even relief – had broken over him. It had all been a dream, a phantom of his fragmented mind, which had been cut to ribbons by Uroborous and reassembled haphazardly, with its neural pathways misaligned. Pieced back together so indiscriminately that it had conjured up a vision of rescue, safe haven, even affection. All those things he neither needed nor deserved.

The cure he had made, the way he had felt – the way Leon had _made_ him feel – it had all been a lie he had told himself. Only the cold embrace of the laboratory had ever been real, and that was as it should be. Better to die, debased and forgotten beneath the earth, than to come so late in life, a groveling penitent, to realize all he had missed.

Gradually, his head cleared.  His eyes were still slow to focus and he had vertigo, almost exactly as if her were unpleasantly drunk. Limited as he was, he was able to take account of his situation.

He was seated in a stiff and uncomfortable stainless steel chair, a piece of furniture created solely to hold up to any kind of abuse that a captive might hurl at it. His wrists were affixed to the arms with thick leather straps, and another leather belt was looped around his ankles, holding his legs in place.

Wesker shifted, testing the bonds. They bit into his skin, chafing against old bruises. His gaze drifted slowly over his surroundings, though in truth there wasn’t much to see: A white tile floor, steel paneling on the walls, a large pane of one-way glass that he was on the wrong side of.

Opposite him, perhaps two yards away, was a second straight-backed chair, the mirror of his own. This one was empty, and the leather straps hung down from the arms like dead things.

It was not the base in Antarctica, but for all its lack of warmth or identity it may as well have been. It might have been any one of a hundred such facilities dotted across the globe, even one of his own. Surely some of those makeshift workspaces he had cobbled together - in cheap old warehouses or cheap new office buildings - during his long years of wandering had been found and repurposed by now. Even those parts of him would still be useful to someone.

As his eyes roamed around the featureless room, slowly relearning their function, Wesker could not shake the idea that he was forgetting something. Perhaps he had only forgotten to panic. Indeed, he felt strangely calm, though he knew what had happened and what must inevitably happen next. His mind knew, but it was slow to transmute that information into an appropriate physical reaction.

Then, all at once, he knew. And the knowing was enough to make him struggle for the first time. He jerked against the leather straps in an attempt to pull himself upright. They flung him back, almost hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Hard enough, at any rate, to make his voice sound quite small and pitiful when he choked out, “Leon?”

He felt ashamed that he had called out to him, but Wesker still waited a moment in silent anticipation, waiting for Leon to speak to him from some hidden corner of the room. As if not even the many tendrils of Wesker’s numerous enemies could be enough to tear them apart.

The only reply that came back to him was the echo of his own voice off the steel walls, more pleading and pitiful with each repetition. Of course Leon wasn’t there. They had never wanted him.

He was probably dead by now. Or, perhaps, by some miracle, he had been spared. Wesker had no idea how he had gotten here, and in fact he could remember very little after retiring to his old room in the mansion with Leon. Some fast-acting and thorough drug must have been used to render him unconscious, though Wesker had not the slightest idea how it might have been administered.

But if that were the case, then was it not also possible that Leon had simply been left behind, unmolested, to sleep it off? Wesker liked that explanation, and he held fast to it. He remembered entirely too well his experience with Jessica and Raymond. They had been sloppy in many ways, but consummate professionals where it mattered the most. Whether this had been orchestrated by one of them or by some other bit of mercenary flotsam cast up on the shores of this latest war, they would have known better than to kill a government agent if it could be avoided.

It might have been nothing more than a pleasant fiction, but in truth worrying about Leon was a comfort to him somehow. Better to think of what had happened to Leon than what was sure to happen to himself. Wesker was alone now, but he wouldn’t be for long. They would come for him in good time, with their knives drawn.

A shudder convulsed his body. He felt his chest tightening, an iron-gauntleted hand squeezing the life out of him.  His blood was throbbing so hard in his ears, that he almost missed the sound of a door in the wall behind him sliding open. He heard someone come in, though, the soft tap of a woman in high heels, moving gracefully.

Wesker did not turn around to look. He would not look, he decided, or speak. And he would try very, very hard not to scream. Then, at least, they would know his contempt for them.

The woman paused behind him. She kept perfectly still for almost half a minute. Though Wesker could not see her, it seemed that he could feel her presence. She held herself straight, as if balancing a stack of books on her head. Her hands were at her sides, not hanging loosely, but knotted into fists.

She didn’t speak, and her silence seemed to draw all the air out of the room, turning it into a sealed vacuum perfectly calibrated for the two of them. It was like being in a bathysphere that had been pressurized for its long trip to the bottom of the sea. All forces internal and external were held in balance, until the first crack appeared in the surface.

“I had heard you were awake,” the woman said at last. Her voice was very soft, low, with a rough edge as if she had long ago swallowed something that had stuck in her throat.

It made Wesker’s heart beat faster, but he didn’t know why until the woman said, “Brother.”

Wesker tensed, as if he had been struck. For the first time since awakening, he felt the old terrors welling up within him. He had not known until that moment how much danger he was really in.

The woman came around so he could see her, taking each step slowly and deliberately, placing the heel of one foot directly in front of the toe of the other as if she were walking on a wire.  She was wearing an immaculate white suit, not a speck of dirt on cuffs or lapels. The blouse underneath was buttoned up all the way to the throat, which, along with the tight bun of scraped-back hair, made her look rather severe and unsparing.

All about her was just as Wesker remembered. She had aged, yes. Aged, perhaps, even more mercilessly than he had, but that only made her more familiar, as if no time at all had passed between them.

“What happened to your hand?” Alex asked, not without gentleness.

Wesker shook his head. “I thought—“ he said. He broke off abruptly, unable to go on.

“I was dead,” Alex said. It was not a question, nor was it meant as a rhetorical continuation of his statement. “So you heard, and so I was. Dead, as you were.”

Wesker did not reply, though he forced herself to meet her eyes. He wanted very badly to look away, out of something like shame.

“But I suppose we both had things left to do,” Alex went on, undeterred by Wesker’s silence. She was a great talker, he remembered, as long as the circumstances were right. Request her presence at one of their father’s interminable dinner parties and she would be as meek and quiet as a dove, but once she was in the presence of someone she respected and loved, she would unspool a great torrent of florid and fantastical talk.

It had always been Wesker that she had loved the most.

“I was there,” she continued. “At the volcano. I brought you out and carried you away, though there was so little of you left.”

“You were in Antarctica too,” Wesker said. “Weren’t you?”

Alex folded her arms and leaned back on her heels, looking down her nose. Though it was a rather scornful gesture, Wesker recognized it at once as one she only employed when she was unsure of what to do next.

“I was,” she said at last, drawing the words out as if fishing about for an excuse, or hoping he would make one for her. “It had to be you, brother. There could be no other.”

Wesker’s fingers tightened on the arm of the chair. It made his wounded hand ache. “More like father every day.”

“Don’t say that,” Alex said. “You don’t mean it.”

“What should I say instead?”

“That you are proud of me?” Alex suggested. “I think that you must be.”

“Why?” Wesker said. “Because you spent twenty years in exile? Walled up in your private convent, tinkering with a single strain of the T-virus? Am I to be impressed? I suppose that you will tell me it’s nearly complete.”

“It is.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

Alex frowned a little. “Listen, Albert. We both know that I was always the better scientist, the more rigorous mind. But you were the one who took action. Once you had decided your course, you were always swift and sure. I envied you that. Now I have made up my mind to take some decisive action as well.”

“And what is that? Kidnapping and torture?”

“You would have done the same.”

“Not to you.” Wesker heard the strange tremor in his voice, but he was powerless to bring it back under control. “You were the one who left, Alex. You walked away. I assumed you wanted nothing to do with that corporate merger our father called a family, so I let you be for all those years. But I would never have done to you what was done to me in that lab. You know this, and neither of us is fooled by trying to pretend otherwise.”

Alex was quiet for a moment, then she sighed. She stepped forward and touched his cheek. It was awkward, hesitant contact, but Wesker let her turn his face up to hers.

“That’s because I’m nothing like you,” she said. “I always knew that. For all our competition growing up, I knew even then that I was but a child playing doctor compared to you. Because of what’s inside you, brother, and what you do to those viruses in your blood. All that comes in contact with you must inevitably be changed.”

“Have I changed you as well?” Wesker asked. “Made a fratricide of you?”

“There’s no need to be melodramatic,” Alex said. “You would have died a dozen times before now, a burnt offering upon the pyre of scientific progress. I’m merely helping you along.”

“You can’t think I’m just going to sit idly by and let you put that cocktail of yours in me, do you?”

“You misunderstand. It’s already been done.”

Wesker’s heart hammered in his chest. He saw Alex lift her chin slightly, and he wondered if she could hear it.

“T-Phobos lies dormant in the system indefinitely,” she went on. “Until the moment its host feels most profound terror. Hopeless, helpless fear from which there is no escape or respite save to become something beyond fear. I thought we might get there Antarctica. After all, I know everything about you, brother, including what you fear the most. I remember how much father used to get under your skin with his insinuations and gestures towards what a good test subject you would make. That certainly kept you up nights, didn’t it? And I admit, I’m surprised it didn’t do the trick. Childhood terrors always run the deepest. You were made of sterner stuff, though.”

“Those imbeciles you got to run your little house of horrors didn’t exactly inspire fear.”

“Those two?” Alex smiled. “I picked them up after Teragregia, a couple of strays looking for a home. They’re insufferable, but they have their uses. I’d have done the work myself, but I didn’t want you to know. Honestly, I half think you would have found some way to sabotage the experiment just to spite me.”

“We’re talking about my body here,” Wesker said.

“A publicly traded commodity, since the day you were born.”

“We’re talking about my life.”

“A life which you squandered,” Alex said. “Which you would continue to squander if I gave you the chance. You know, I watched you after you left Antarctica as well. How quickly you took to that man. Your unearned confidence that you would be able to reinvent yourself again, that this time it would stick.”

“I never thought that,” Wesker said quietly. “I never believed that.”

“But you wanted to,” Alex said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. A grown man like you, thinking that he could cram himself back into that Pandora’s Box that burst open in Raccoon City.” Her eyes narrowed suddenly. “And with someone like that. How could you?”

Wesker felt a cold dread steal over him. Deep in his breast something stirred, the faint beating of dark wings. They fluttered once and then were still, but he knew now that something was there. It might have been Alex’s designer T-virus, dormant as she had said but coaxed into the first throes of life by a thought that had just occurred to him.

“Alex,” he asked, taking care to keep his voice even, steely. No good would come of her knowing what had unsettled him. “Where is Leon now?”

She did not laugh, though for a moment she looked as if she wanted to. Instead, she stroked his cheek, drawing her strong delicate fingers up his jaw to his hairline. “It took you so long to ask about him. You ought to consider why that is.”

“I don’t know where you got these notions about us, but they’re ill-conceived. You’re mistaken.”

“No, you are the one who is mistaken. You have been mistaken. Those tears you shed over him, that precious blood you passed from your veins to his. Those were the mistakes.”

“How could you know such things?” Wesker snapped.

“I saw everything, brother,” Alex all but whispered. “And I know you better than you know yourself.”

That much, at least, Wesker could not dispute. With some reluctance, he turned his face up so he could look her in the eye. Her irises were blue, but not reminiscent of Wesker’s own. They were darker, almost indigo. And besides, Wesker reminded himself, his own had not been that color in a long time.

“Is he still alive?” he asked quietly.

“Alive, yes,” Alex said. She seemed thoughtful for a second. Even, to Wesker’s estimation, a little sad. “He must be quite the man to have conquered that unassailable heart of yours.”

“You don’t understand…” It seemed a weak and pitiful protest, and Wesker looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

“I don’t,” Alex said. “But it seems almost a shame that he must die like this.”

Wesker’s eyes snapped back to her. Again, he felt the fluttering of wings, as if he were caging a bird behind his ribs.

She went on, “You had your chance and now you have lost it. You were too proud to give in to despair and fear. Now I must find something else that frightens you. And indeed, it seems I have.”

She turned away from him. The instant her gaze was no longer on him, he felt as if he had been freed from the basilisk’s stare and he could move freely once again. He began to work at his trapped wrists. Some of his immense and terrible strength must remain, he thought. It would have to be enough.

He tugged at his right hand, chafing the stump of his amputated finger against the stiff leather. It sent a jolt of pain up his arm, almost to the elbow. The wound opened up and blood began to flow.

Alex drew a phone out of her blazer and touched the screen once, briefly. Almost at once, a panel in the smooth steel wall slid open and a creature shuffled in as if it had been waiting in the wings for its cue.

The thing had been a female human once, but it was hideously deformed, mutated beyond anything Wesker had seen in all his work with Uroborous or anything else for that matter. Its flesh had a livid, raw appearance, as if it had been turned inside out. Though its left side still maintained a crude human shape, the right seemed to have all but melted.

The damage started at the woman’s scalp and cascaded downward. The flesh of her face looked like it had been peeled or sloughed off in strips. Most of the muscle had eroded from around her eye, which looked like a pulpy black fruit balanced atop a stalk of bone. Below the neck, the damage was worse. Her whole torso made a sweeping turn to the side, as if the flesh and bone there had been pulled like clay, and ended in a twisted mandible where her arm had been.

She dragged one elephantine leg behind her, so for a moment it was difficult to see that she dragged something else as well. The whole hand on her left side was twisted around Leon’s collar, and she towed him behind her so he slid bodily across the floor with each lurching step. He was unconscious, but, by Wesker’s estimation, unhurt. At some point, someone had dressed him with neat fussiness in the blue suit Wesker had picked out for him.

With some difficulty, the creature maneuvered Leon’s limp body into the empty chair. Manipulating the straps around his wrists and ankles seemed to cause it more problems still, but eventually it got them into place.

All through the macabre slapstick, Wesker had continued to work his trapped wrist. He did so automatically, almost unconsciously, for he had much to occupy his conscious mind. His eyes kept flicking from his sister’s turned back, to Leon’s peaceful face, to the corpus of the creature unlike any he had ever seen before.

Alex had been working hard, he had to admit. Though he could see little of the ruthless efficiency of the original T-virus, nor the sleek and compact beauty of Uroborous in what she had made.

Even after Leon was in place and the creature had retreated to the corner of the room where it sat lolling its bifurcated tongue like an overheated dog, Alex did not turn to face him. It had not occurred to Wesker until this moment that she might be deliberately putting it off.

She moved instead to stand over Leon, and she spent an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing his face. Then she turned abruptly on her heels and, taking those same careful tightrope-walker steps, glided over to one of the steel cabinets against the wall. She opened a drawer and took out some items that had been prepared beforehand.

The first of these was a syringe full of cloudy liquid. She set it on a small steel table, within easy reach. Though Wesker didn’t want to look, he felt his eyes drawn towards it. He felt himself drawn towards it, and it to him in turn. It froze him in place; even the blood from his mangled hand stopped dripping.

“Uroborous,” he murmured.

Alex turned back to him, startled. “How did you know that? Does it call to you still?”

“What is it doing here?”

“Consider it a last resort. I will use it.” Alex nodded towards Leon. “On him.”

Wesker’s fists clenched.

“Does that frighten you?” Alex said. “It would frighten him, to know in those last moments of conscious thought what he was becoming. Of course, he’s never seen it, has he? He only heard rumors of what Uroborous can do, whispers. You’ve experienced it, though. Haven’t you, brother?”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Wesker said. “And it won’t work. You don’t scare me.”

“All right,” Alex said mildly. “We’ll see.”

She reached back into the drawer and pulled out a stainless steel tray with a row of gleaming surgical instruments on it. Wesker had seen his share of arrangements like that before, and the sight of this one was enough to make his heart leap into his throat. But Alex did not turn towards him. Instead, she took them over to the chair where Leon was, unconscious and unaware.

Once her attention was no longer focused on him, he started to work at his bonds again. Each jerk of his right hand sent a jolt of pain up his arm, but he’d felt pain before and it was nothing new now. The leather strap around his right wrist had begun to grow stiff as the blood on it dried. It loosened up again now as fresh blood soaked into it, making it supple and slick around his wrist.

Alex set the tray next to Leon’s chair and arranged it with a surgeon’s practiced hand. She brushed back a lock of hair that had come loose from her bun and picked up a scalpel off the tray.

Leon stirred. Perhaps his sense of self-preservation was trying to wake him, trying to alert him or something. Alex made a swift and decisive movement of her hand, half hidden behind her body.

A single piercing cry filled the room. Leon came awake screaming, was screaming before he was even fully conscious. Alex moved slightly to the side, giving Wesker a glimpse of Leon’s shoulder, with the handle of the scalpel wedged into the joint like the stamen in the center of a bloody flower.

“Leon,” Wesker managed to get out. His voice was quickly growing thin and pinched by his constricting throat. “I’m here.”

Leon’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, settling momentarily on Alex, on the wound in his shoulder, on the creature that waited patiently in the corner of the room, then  at last circling back to settling on Wesker’s face. “What’s happening?” he wheezed. “Wesker, what--?”

He had no chance to finish. Alex reached across his body and jerked the scalpel out. Leon cried out again, his head slamming back against the chair with a hollow thud.

“Wait…” Wesker started to say, but he didn’t know who he was talking to. Alex couldn’t hear him, and Leon didn’t seem to be listening.

Wesker jerked hard on his trapped wrists. The left one was still caught firmly, but the right gave a little. The blood had made the leather of the strap pliable and slick, and the missing finger made the span of his hand slightly less broad. Not enough to pull free, but almost.

Though his eyes were fixed on the chair in front of him, he forced himself to look through it, to somehow not see that Alex had continued to cut. Leon was still making pained noises, sounds without words or hope of respite, but Wesker forced himself to ignore that as well.

He was scared, Alex had been right about that. And if she had been right about the virus as well - one that came awake when the host was in the grips of terror – he would have to steel himself to keep from waking it. For Alex had been right about one more thing as well. She had known that everything that was in him and all that passed through him became somehow, inevitably changed. Whatever she had infected him with would become tainted, terrible.

Yes, she had known that even before he had.

At some point, Leon passed out and fell silent. Then he woke up again with a moan that that pierced like an arrow. Wesker no longer tried to speak to him; it would only be wasted breath. Alex was still cutting, cutting with a slow and steady hand that did not waver no matter how much Leon writhed. A pool of blood was beginning to form around her feet.

Wesker jerked back on his right hand. Most of it slipped through the leather strap, but it caught at the widest part, with the stump of his finger wedged against the leather. A jolt of agony shot up his arm. Then he pulled again and his hand slipped free.

His hand dropped to his side and his head fell back. A strange bitter taste flooded the back of his throat, and a tide of static rose in his head, humming in his ears. It was beyond hurt, beyond exhaustion. It felt like something rising inside him, lifting him out of himself.

It would have been easy to give into it, to let it sweep him aside as Uroborous once had. Bear him up and carry him out of the reach of human pain and weakness and terror. The way it had always been meant to be for him.

Wesker felt he was on the verge of something, that his toes were up against the edge of a precipice, and all he needed to do was let himself fall. He had fallen before. There was nothing easier than that…

With a groan, Wesker pulled himself back. The precipice was still there, within his breast, opening wider, but he had forced himself to step back from it, at least for the moment. His hand throbbed, but he made himself move, to unbuckle the strap around his left wrist and then the one around his ankles.

He stood up. His limbs prickled with pins and needles and he stumbled momentarily then found his balance. Leon was still making pained noises, but a good deal more quietly now. His voice had become harsh and rough, as if his throat had been rubbed raw by the barbs of his screams.

The creature in the corner had seen Wesker get to his feet and it put up the alarm, a horrific animal howl that seemed to fill the entire room, as if the chamber itself had become a giant, malformed throat vibrating around him. It rushed at him, and Wesker moved as well. Two steps brought him to the table where Alex had left the sample of Uroborous. He scooped up the syringe, weighting it in his hand. It would not take him this time, that much he was certain of. The serpent he had suckled at his breast would not want him now, not after all he had endured. It would reject his ravaged body like it had so many others.

He no longer cared. Even a monster could take revenge.

They were all watching him now. Alex had half-turned so she could see him. The scalpel was in her hand and a bemused expression was on her face. Leon, too, had lifted his head, though it was only willpower that kept it there. His arm from the shoulder to the middle of his bicep was a mass of raw flesh, all the skin flayed away.

Wesker thought that he must be beyond understanding, so deep in shock that Alex and Wesker and everything else passed as shades before his rapidly darkening vision. But then his body convulsed, just once, and his eyes met Wesker’s for a moment, focusing on him, seeing him. He would see the change, too, when it came.

It was only then, in that instant, that he felt the fear Alex had spoken of. It finished tearing open the chasm in his chest and then it rose up out of it to fill him, leaving room for nothing else.

Wesker was aware that there were tears in his eyes. The kind of tears that came as a last resort, born from agony and terror against which there was no other defense.

He gripped the syringe in one hand and squeezed it. The glass shattered, cutting into his palm. His flesh burned as the virus began to seep into the lacerations in his skin. He felt it burning, burning as it moved up his arm and towards his heart.


	26. Chapter 26

Jake knew he had dragged his feet getting back to the old Umbrella compound, and that was all on him. He hadn’t wanted to see Wesker again, and by the time he’d finally made his way back up the mountain road that was really little more than a trail, he’d gotten his wish.

There were a mess of fresh tracks in the snow out front of the mansion, but whoever had been there while Jake was licking his wounds at some roughneck bar down the mountain, had long since gotten what they came for and left.

Wesker and Leon were both gone. Jake got that part figured out pretty quick, as well as the fact that there wasn’t much blood except for the good deal of blood left in the lab where Leon had been. His gun was still on the counter, exactly where he had left it. There was no question, then, that they had both gone without a struggle, even if that didn’t mean that they had gone willingly.

The only question that did remain was just what the hell Jake was supposed to do now.

He started with a quick canvass of the mansion, which turned out not to be quick at all since the damn place took up about a whole city block and was laid out like a maze. He found Leon’s phone in one of the rooms in the residential wing, as well as the remains of a fairly recent fire in the fireplace. A couple of glasses sat on the mantle. One still had a little scotch in the bottom of it, but the other was drained dry.

Son of a bitch, Jake marveled. Leon had actually pulled through.

There wasn’t much else to find in the other rooms except for a couple of mummified raccoons and a lot of bird shit. Jake headed back downstairs and sat on the front step and tried to decide what to do next.

After a few minutes he got cold, so he went to do his thinking in the car with the heater running.

They weren’t dead. He had no proof of that, and yet somehow he was certain. Neither of them had died before now – at least not permanently – and it seemed pretty unlikely to him that they were both going to choose this exact moment to start. But none of that put Jake any closer to knowing what the hell he was supposed to do about it.

 In a brief moment of weakness, he almost considered putting in a call to the BSAA.

No, he told himself firmly. Hell no. The last thing he needed was to freak out and make things worse.

He hated that idea – that he was losing it – but by this point it was pretty clear that he was on the verge of it. He couldn’t help it, though. People seemed to keep vanishing from his life. It was enough to make a guy painfully aware of the fact that he was the defining factor.

Jake felt his breathing starting to get fast, his heart beginning to pound at his temples. The passenger window of the car steamed up. He was well on his way to a full-blown panic attack right there, when all at once his phone rang.

He didn’t want to answer it. Didn’t want to deal with the apocalyptic event that was surely unfolding on the other end of the phone. But on the fourth ring, he snatched it up. “What?” he growled.

As if by some miracle, Sherry’s voice drifted back to him through a snow of static.

The change that came over him was stark and immediate. It was only when his body had begun to respond to Sherry’s voice and calm down that he realized how wound up he had been. Carefully, methodically, without even meaning to or knowing that she was doing it, Sherry walked him back from the edge of the cliff he had been about to pitch over and set him tenderly on solid ground once more.

There was a slight quiver in her voice when she spoke, but she was composed when she told him where she was and filled him in on the past week. She told it like it was a movie, or a glamorous dream. Even when she said she had been scared, she made it sound like she knew the meaning of the word only in theoretical and broadly-sketched strokes.

She was fine, she assured him. She would put in a call to Ada in a minute and get everything sorted out. Unless Ada had been in on it all along, which of course she was not.

“But what about you?” she asked. For a moment, Jake didn’t know what she meant. It was as if, for a moment, everything had fallen away and they had been jettisoned back to the safe cocoon of their condo in DC. The way she said it, she made it sound as if she had just given one of her long monologue complaining about some small issue at the office and now she was – half politely and half self-consciously – giving him the opportunity to vent as well.

He couldn’t tell her everything. Not like this. He could not speak of meeting his father, nor of leaving Leon alone with him to get up to whatever they had gotten up to. He could give her the facts, but not the secrets that crept and skulked behind them. It was only then that he realized Sherry, too, must be keeping something back. The story she had told him of where she had been was too neat to not have unspoken depths of its own.

But in the same instant that he realized that, Jake also knew that he didn’t care. Whatever secrets Sherry might be keeping, about the past or the present, she would give them up when she was ready. He would trust her until then, because he loved her. He loved her, and those confidences and whatever old traumas she cultivated them again were a part of her.

It made him calm when he thought about it like that. It made him feel steady and confident when he told her, “Babe, Leon’s gone.”

***

Before she hung up, Sherry told him that her phone only had about 10 percent of its battery left. But she got more done with that 10 percent then Jake had managed since this whole mess had started.

She knew he was squeamish about talking to Chris Redfield, so she put in the call to the BSAA. Jake wasn’t sure what she told them, but when, a couple of hours later, one of their black, unmarked, all but silent helicopters touched down in the ruined courtyard of the Umbrella facility, the uniformed guards who hustled Jake aboard were polite and deferential.

They whisked him off to a facility deep in the Wyoming Badlands, and – in their polite and deferential way - they made it clear that he wasn’t a prisoner but he wasn’t free to leave, either.

Jake waited. It was anticlimactic.

Early the next day, Sherry arrived. Jake was allowed to meet her on the heliport, and when she saw him she flung her arms around his neck and clung to him tightly. He’d missed her plenty too, but it wasn’t like her to be so demonstrative in her affections. He was worried for a second, but then he felt her hand moving under his coat, slipping something small and metallic into his pocket.

He understood at once. The BSAA had confiscated her phone, and all the satellite data stored on it. But she had set something aside, kept it from their prying eyes and prodding hands. Something for them alone.

The mission commander wanted to meet with them right away, but Sherry insisted on a shower first. She returned looking tired but fresh, a slightly wilted daisy in jeans and an emerald green sweater.

A detail of guards escorted them to a conference room buried underground. Tasteful nature photography lined the walls, but they only served as a reminder of the unnerving lack of windows and taste of recycled air.

Chris was waiting for them. At first, Jake was surprised to see him, but when he thought it over he realized it was the most natural thing in the world. Chris had heard Wesker’s name and just had to start sniffing around, like a pig trained to root up rare truffles.

“Nice to see you two again,” Chris said. “Wish it could be under better circumstances.”

“Is it ever?” Jake asked. The young woman seated at Chris’ side shot him a dark look. She was tall, tough-looking, but she was still a rookie and she wore the BSAA blacks like Halloween was coming. She certainly seemed attached to Chris, though. Probably thought he was hot shit, like that kid back in Lianshang had.

He wondered what that kid had done to get Chris to throw him over for the latest model. Then he remembered: Shit, that kid had died.

That made him feel a little bad, and Jake took his seat without any further huffing and puffing. Sherry noticed, and she gave him a concerned look. It didn’t seem to get through to Chris, though, and if it had he didn’t care.

“This is Lieutenant Olivia Martinez,” Chris said, indicating the rookie. “She’s got clearance. You can speak freely.”

This was starting to feel like a real chore, but Jake had decided that he was really making an effort to be a good boy. Finding Wesker had been his idea, a fact which Chris no doubt remembered, and even though he hadn’t expected it all to get this out of hand, the whole thing was kind of on him.

They were looking at him. Waiting for him to speak. He took a deep breath and began: “He wouldn’t stay dead. No matter what they did, he wouldn’t stay down.”

***

Jake got the whole story out in one go. Occasionally, Chris or the rookie lieutenant would throw in a question, but mostly they just let him talk. When he was done, Sherry pressed her foot against his under the table. Then she turned to Chris and said brightly, “We expect to be kept informed of developments on this case, and, as a representative of the US government, I want the option of taking on an advisory role in any resulting military operation.”

Chris shook his head in irritated disgust. Sherry flashed him a winning smile.

He took the young lieutenant aside, and Jake could tell that they were arguing. They kept their voices down for the most part, but Martinez looked about purple with rage at whatever hard truths of counter-terrorism Chris was no doubt schooling her in.

Eventually, he came back. “We’re open to sharing information with the NSA on a need-to-know basis,” he told them.

“Who says there’s no interdepartmental cooperation in the Armed Forces?” Sherry chirped. She seemed awfully up-beat and cheerfully. Jake knew exactly what she was doing, but it seemed miraculous to him that it was working so well.

“Lieutenant Martinez is going to be in charge of intel on this one. We’ve had surveillance on Mr. Mueller and his associates since he approached me with this incredibly naive and short-sighted idea, but at the moment I cannot confirm or deny whether anything pertinent to the case at hand has been gathered.”

“You _what_?” Jake sputtered.

“That showed a lot of forethought, Commander Redfield,” Sherry said, cutting Jake off. “Of course, the NSA is highly skilled at sorting through SIGINT data. I’ll be happy to assist your Lieutenant on the matter.”

Without waiting for the okay from Chris, Sherry skipped off to join Martinez, who by that point had doubtlessly decided that she was the least of the three evils in the room and accepted her with weary resignation.

Jake was left alone, with Chris.

“You didn’t have to spy on me,” Jake told him after what felt like an interminable awkward silence.

“I did a lot of things I didn’t have to.”

“Like tell me where he was?”

Chris scowled and looked away, a sign of agreement if Jake had ever seen one.

“So why’d you do it?” Jake said.

That seemed to trip Chris up. He was quiet for a long time. At last he said, “When you were a kid, were you into dystopias? Like, all those movies about oppressive governments keeping secrets, making people suffer. I’m talking about _1984_ and stuff.”

“Sure,” Jake said. “Yevgeny Zamyatin.”

“Whatever,” Chris replied. “Anyway, the thing about those stories is they never really make it clear how the world got that way. It seemed stupid to me. Like, wouldn’t people fight? We’re Americans, after all. We’ve all got guns. But it was like, people just woke up one day and they were already in the middle of it. I didn’t get it, until I guess one day I woke up and I was in the middle of it too.”

Chris sighed. His hands clenched into meaty fists on the table in front of him. He seemed distracted by them, fascinated by their strength.

“I worked so hard, gave up everything, just to find him and kill him. Then I did that, and nothing got any better. It was like, everything had gone to hell a little at a time, out of people’s neglect and fear and compromise. I thought maybe one big gain could make up for all those little losses and then everything would be all right again. But it didn’t, and it was stupid of me to think that it could.”

Jake shrugged. “I guess. But it doesn’t mean a lot coming from the BSAA.”

“I’m doing my best,” Chris said. “Don’t get me wrong, Wesker’s a fucking asshole, but he never neglected anything he thought was important. He was never afraid, and he never compromised.”

“He was afraid,” Jake said, very quietly.

“What?”

“He was afraid, when I found him. He was really afraid then.”

Chris glared down at his hands for a long moment. Then he looked up abruptly.

“All right, then,” he said, in a tone that was at once obscure and exhausted. “I’ll remember that. I’d better check in on Lieutenant Martinez.”

“She’s about as green as they come,” Jake said.

“We all were,” Chris said. “Once.”


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may have all gotten a little out of hand...

At first, very little happened. Wesker felt Uroborous enter his body, felt it burrow under his skin like so many crawling insects. He even felt it when it reached his central nervous system, where it coiled around the bundle of nerves sheathed by his vertebrae and settled like a snake on a branch.

And then, nothing.

Wesker was left holding the broken and empty syringe. It slipped from his numb fingers and fell to the ground.

“What did you do _that_ for?” Alex snapped. She sounded more annoyed than angry, more exasperated than fearful.

All at once, he remembered the music room in their father’s mansion, where they would sometimes go to be alone in the evenings. Alex had been quite an accomplished violinist, and he recalled that he would accompany her on the piano. She liked Mahler’s _Adagietto_ for strings. Slow, inscrutable, and utterly unexpected.

She had been a better player than him, but she had held back on his account. If he made a mistake in his fingerings, she would scold him gently, but then she would go back to the beginning for him, giving him a chance to get it right.

He had not understood then, had assumed it was some unknowable weakness or defect in her that had made her keep something back, never burning as brightly as she had been meant to burn. But he understood now, though he had not thought of it in years: to surpass him would mean having to go on alone, explore a new and uncharted country and leave him, a castaway upon familiar shores.

“Alex…” he began. There was so much he wanted to say. He couldn’t think of it right now, but at any moment he would remember all of it.

He didn’t get the chance.

Alex stepped forward, reaching for his injured hand as if to inspect the damage. Before she could touch him, the first convulsion ripped through his body.

It threw him back with enough force to knock him to the ground, but he didn’t fall. Though it seemed as if all the strength had rushed out of him, Wesker stayed on his feet as if he were suspended from a wire.

There was a hammering in his chest, like a beating of wings, bruising him from the inside out. The knocking in his breast grew more frantic with each blow from within, and soon he knew something would have to burst free.

A tremendous pressure built in his head, gathering at his temples into two white hot points. Though his teeth were clenched and his jaw set, a thin cry leaked from his parched throat, barely more than a whimper. He didn’t have the breath to register a louder protest. When the next convulsion came, it jerked him forward as if to throw him on the ground, prostrate before the unknowable power he had unleashed, but that same invisible thread kept him upright, throughout the whole undignified business.

Wesker raised his hands to the sides of his head and pressed them hard against his temples where the pressure was intolerable. The skin there was hot enough to sear him. He could hear the sweat on his palms hissing and popping, and he smelled burning flesh.

As his muscles wound up tight for the next convulsion, Wesker had a moment in which to catch his breath. He expelled it almost immediately in a scream, a wordless cry of protest, not against the pain and indignity, but against the monumental unfairness that he would lose himself in this way.

Then his body jerked back again, bending so far that his spine cracked. His ribs began to pop, dislocating one after the next, like the teeth of a zipper. It was going to shake him to pieces, Wesker realized with dawning horror. Whatever lethal viral cocktail had been made manifest in his blood, it was not going to mutate his body. It was going to tear him apart and then rebuild out of whatever scrap remained salvageable.

He fought it. Everyone fought, and everyone always lost. He knew that better than anyone, and yet he fought all the same. He had to fight, or else it would mean he was no longer human at all.

The next jolt that ran through his body threw him to his hands and knees. He vomited a torrent of blood – bright, arterial red. Blood ran from his nose as well, and his eyes dripped bloody tears. This, too, he had seen before. Marburg, 1967. Back then, it had all seemed so beautiful and haunting and strange.

The pain ceased, all at once, without any period of recovery at all. One moment he was wracked by agony and then next he was shaky and weak but entirely unhurt.

Bracing himself against the next wave of anguish, Wesker raised himself to his knees. He felt a curious tickling sensation on his face as the blood that had run from his eyes and nose reversed course and flowed back into his veins.

It seemed a strange music was humming in his head. As it built, the pressure inside his skull returned, but this time there was no pain to go with it. Only the feeling of a gentle yet insistent force pushing him along towards some inevitable destination.

Hurry up, please. It’s time.

He raised one hand to touch his temple, but he didn’t make it all the way. He laid his fingers against his cheek, as if he had just thought of something to say. And then the flesh on the sides of his head split open.

Bloodlessly, painlessly, two blunt daggers emerged from beneath his skin. Both pressed backwards and upwards, and then curled under so they encircled his ears in gilded loops.

They formed two perfect golden horns, curved like a ram’s.

Though the horns made him feel a little top heavy and off balance, Wesker got to his feet. That same sweet, patient pressure was building in him again. This time it made a warm knot in the center of his chest.

Wesker was done fighting it. When the knot swelled to press against his spine, he let it come as it would. The muscle and bone of his back peeled away, allowing new appendages to work free of his shoulder blades. There was a soft popping sound as they tore through the back of his shirt.

He stretched his wings out to their full span. A few black feathers, shaken loose by the emergence, drifted down to land at his feet.

No more than a few seconds had passed, and yet Wesker felt as if it had been years. As if he had lived and died a thousand times in the moments it took for his body to change.

Alex’s creature started towards him once more. Now that he was on his feet, it no doubt considered him a threat again. It was fast for an animal its size, but to Wesker it seemed hardly to move at all. He had time to see everything: the crust of old blood on its claws, the gleam of fluorescent light off the scaly patches on its skin, the colors of its black eye, like a rainbow in oil.

His hand snapped out and caught the creature around the throat, stopping its charge. He noticed then that his missing finger had grown back, into a delicate bronze talon, mismatched to the others. He could see the veins in the back of his hand and forearm very clearly. They were opaque, gold, throbbing gently beneath his skin.

He reached over with the other hand and, with a tender flick of his wrist, separated the creature’s head from its body.

Dropping the two pieces at his feet, he turned his attention to Alex. She had retreated a few paces, but only to give him the space his transformation had demanded. There was no fear in her eyes and she had no intention of running from him.

Wesker might have forgiven her everything, though perhaps she had planned for even that eventuality, during all those long years alone. She had already decided that forgiveness was the one thing she could not abide in him.

Alex took a single deliberate step back, bringing her to Leon’s side. She held Wesker’s eyes the whole time, neither blinking nor looking away as she raised the scalpel and stabbed it into the side of Leon’s throat.

His head jerked up and his hands convulsed against the arms of the chair. He made a wet gagging noise, choked off as Alex pulled the scalpel free once more.

A gout of blood leapt from his neck, tracing the arc the blade had drawn in the air. Again, Wesker saw everything, too sharply. He saw the way Leon’s throat hitched as he struggled for breath, the way his eyes clouded with panic, the way his body tensed and arched in a grim echo of how it had when they were in bed.

Wesker started forward. Alex leaned into him, meeting him without flinching or hesitating. One hand caught hold of his gilded horn, the other drove the scalpel deep into his midsection. He seized her around the waist and effortlessly bore her back.

He felt the shift of strange muscles in his back. He flexed them, and his great raven wings lifted up and out. Then they beat down, driving the air before them, lifting his feet off the ground with an effortlessness that was almost absurd.

They hit the one-way glass that made up one wall of the laboratory and they burst through to the other side. Wesker spilled them out in a hallway, not subterranean and shameful, but brightly-lit and airy. On the side opposite the lab, a balcony thrust out over the ocean. The hallway was too narrow to accommodate his wings, and so on the next stroke he angled for the open space.

Again, he propelled them through a glass wall; floundering briefly, catching himself. Feeling his body twist balletically and right itself with almost no effort on his part at all. He was struck by that; it was as if this new form was so perfectly symmetrical that it tended towards order rather than chaos.

Though surely that had not escaped Alex either, at least in some capacity, she was not in any mood to be distracted. She hadn’t lost the grip on her scalpel and she drove it into him again and again, piercing his stomach, his side.

Wesker hardly felt it. Indeed, the flesh seemed to heal almost as soon as it was punctured, so quickly that she had to pull hard on the handle to free the blade when his body closed around it.

He had plenty of room now, and he stretched his wings out to their full span, almost twenty feet from tip to tip. When he beat them, they displaced so much air that he felt his ears pop from the change in pressure.

Even Alex had to stop and acknowledge that.

A single stroke lifted them clear of the balcony; a second took them out over the ocean. The sea was blue, and the cliffs white. The sun was warm against his back where his clothing had torn away.

Alex did not try to hold onto him. Her fingers had gone lax on the curve of his horn, curled around it without strength. He had more than enough strength of his own to hold them both. Once, Uroborous had seemed inexhaustible in its power, but now he knew how insufficient it had really been. It was but a minor demon with delusions of grandeur, masquerading as a god.

Wesker wheeled around and landed on the tile roof of the villa, two or three stories up from the balcony. He was out over the water; it was a sheer drop straight down. He canopied his wings around them, like a brooding gargoyle, to block the wind.

“Albert,” Alex said quietly.

He turned to look at her. At some point, her hair had come down and the wind whipped it around her face.

“I knew you liked the Mediterranean,” she said. “I remembered that.”

He kept one arm around her waist, holding her against him, her feet just beyond the edge of the roof. He raised the other and he stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers, pushing her hair back. He had touched her like that before, all those years ago, and he wondered if his new powers might have hidden depths, secrets he had not even dared to imagine. The ability to force them back through time, to the exact moment where everything had gone wrong. The chance to do everything over again, and to get it all right this time.

No, no, that would not come to pass. Whatever had happened inside his body, he knew that he was no god who might unravel and remake the past as he wished. He was a man, and he had to live as one.

“I know,” he said. “Thank you.”

Alex shook her head.

“Don’t talk so much,” she told him. “It’s too late for that.”

Wesker realized she was right. Anything he might try to say now would only be futile and humiliating for both of them. But silence was a lesson he had never learned particularly well.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For all of it, I’m sorry.”

Alex said nothing. He knew that she was waiting. Her feet were clear of the edge of the roof and she was waiting for him to let her go. She would fall without a sound and hit the water far below with hardly a ripple. It seemed she knew all of that would happen very soon now. All he had to do was loosen his grip.

With a sigh, Wesker swung her back onto the roof. When her feet touched the tile they were reluctant to take her weight and she sank to her knees.

“I’ll come back for you,” Wesker said, then he stepped off the edge of the roof and wheeled in a tight gyre back down to the balcony. His wings folded against his back, but even at rest they were a little too long for his body and the tips of the alar feathers dragged on the ground.

Not quite perfect after all, he thought, with a kind of obscure and melancholy relief.

He picked his way through the broken glass, back into the laboratory. Leon’s body hung limp against his restraints, his chin sunk on his breast. Wesker was certain he was too late, but then he saw Leon’s chest stir as he drew in a halting breath.

Wesker cupped his hand over the hole in the side of Leon’s throat and pressed down. A weak pulse fluttered under his palm, and the blood flowing from the wound had slowed to a trickle.

Leon’s eyes fluttered open, and Wesker helped him left his head. His lips made a couple of silent false starts, but eventually Leon spoke.

“You’re finally a god.”

“No,” Wesker said. With a sudden urgency, he bent his head and pressed a kiss to Leon’s mouth, tasting blood. “Don’t die.”

“Okay,” Leon whispered. His lips twitched into a smile. Then his gaze slipped out of focus and his pulse shuddered once more beneath Wesker’s hand and did not come again.

Wesker waited a moment, just to be sure, then he unbuckled the straps around Leon’s wrists and ankles, then he lifted his limp body into his arms. Though he was still and silent, his body still seemed to hum with some ineffable force.

It was Uroborous, Wesker realized. The virus he had given him, singing its funeral song as Leon’s body put out the lights and closed up shop around it. Wesker’s own blood reverberated with it, as if a wire had been strung from Leon’s heart to his own, and when it was plucked it played upon them both.

Wherever Leon was now and whatever Wesker had become, they would always have that to tie them together. Whether unto godhood or into death, they were as one.

All at once, Wesker realized what it meant.

Uroborous had been trying to tell him all along. It had called out to him from within its darkening shell, and his own body had yearned back. Coaxing him to touch the gash on Leon’s neck, to kiss his coppery lips. It had known the truth, long before Wesker had, the truth of the blood they shared.

It whispered to him that, even now, it was not too late.

Wesker knelt and laid Leon’s still body down on the floor. He felt along the floor until he found a jagged shard of broken glass. Picking it up, he slid the sharp edge across his palm so that blood welled around it. The cut closed up before it could fall.

It needed something to coax it out.

He bent over Leon’s body and placed his hand close to the hole in his throat. This time when he sliced open his palm the cut spread itself open and the blood beaded on his skin as if it were boiling. He pressed his hand over Leon’s neck, and he felt the skin beneath his palm pull itself back together.

When he took his hand away, the wound had closed completely. Wesker touched Leon’s shoulder next, where the flesh had been flayed. The damaged tissue knitted back together beneath his touch, healing so cleanly and completely that not even a scar remained.

Still, though, he did not breathe.

Wesker waited what felt like a long time for Leon’s heart to start beating again. It couldn’t do it on its own, or else it would not. Either way, it was waiting for something else, some spark of life, or else some reason to live. This Wesker understood less clearly, but maybe understanding was not required.

He pressed a kiss to Leon’s still lips.

One hand rested on Leon’s chest, and Wesker felt a faint vibration beneath his fingers. It was his heart struggling to beat. He kissed him again, urgently, and Leon sucked in a breath.

Then he was coughing and struggling to lift himself, and Wesker was helping him sit up, pulling him close.

Leon’s hands pawed blindly at his shoulders, and eventually he got his arms around Wesker’s neck where he clung as he gasped for breath. In time, he rallied himself under control again, but he didn’t let go.

“Shit,” he said, and coughed weakly. He pressed his face against Wesker’s shoulder until it had passed. “I am never doing that again.”

“You’re alive,” Wesker said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’m all right now.”

Wesker eased him back. Leon was reluctant to let go, but in the end he relented.

“Are you still you?” Wesker said.

Leon didn’t answer right away. His gaze was fixed on Wesker’s face, and slowly his mouth twisted into a frown.

“Your eyes…” he said quietly.

Wesker could have laughed. After everything that had happened, Leon still fixated on the strangest things. “What have they done now?” he said. “Some new crime against aesthetics and good taste?”

“They’re blue.”

That wasn’t what he had expected. Slowly, he raised a hand to his face and traced the hollow below one of his eyes as if he might be able to feel the change there. “Are you sure?”

Leon nodded. “You look really different, Wesker.” He swallowed hard, throat hitching. “You are something really different now, aren’t you?”

Wesker hadn’t thought about it like that until now. Slowly, as if fearful of upsetting the delicate equilibrium of his new body, he got to his feet. With careful, deliberate steps he went over to the broken pane of one-way glass. In one corner, a large jagged sheet still remained in the frame. He could see his reflection in it.

He recognized his face. All its hard, fine, sharp, delicate lines were just as he remembered: no longer young, starting to show the weathering of age. Worn along familiar paths, pensive and uninviting. But there was something else, too. Set in that old face were the blue eyes of a young man, not even 30 yet, like keepsakes from a time when death had been but a whisper, a rumor.

He wore a horned crown, the color of brushed gold. The horns arched up and back, encircling his head. When he touched the spot where they emerged from his temples the seam between flesh and bone was neat and small. When he moved the muscles in his shoulders and chest, they flexed in new arrangements, making his wings ruffle their feathers and then resettle so that they lay sleek and flush against his back.

Leon stepped up beside him and touched his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

It seemed like a sound suggestion. Wesker took him out onto the balcony that overlooked the ocean.

Leon glanced over the edge, and then back at Wesker’s wings. “There’s no way those things actually work,” he said.

“Why not?” Wesker replied, in truth a little offended by the presumption.

“You’re way too heavy. The physics don’t even make sense—“

Wesker kissed him to shut him up, which Leon obliged. He put his arms around Wesker’s neck, and before he had a chance to protest, Wesker hopped over the balcony railing and into space.

Leon had enough time to gasp, then Wesker unfurled his great wings. They caught the wind from the ocean and buoyed upward. In truth, Leon was right; an efficient glide rather than true flight was the most Wesker could manage for any sustained stretch. It was sufficient to get them down from the villa, which was set into a cliff at the pinnacle of the island. Part way down, he spotted a flat stretch of land, just large enough to support a cluster of olive trees, and he angled for it.

He touched down lightly and set Leon on his feet. Leon clutched at the rough trunk of one of the trees and tried to get his land legs back.

“Not fun,” he said, but if he was angry he got over it with his habitual ease. He looked up at Wesker but didn’t make any move to touch him. Though Wesker might have demanded it of him, he didn’t. It was as if Leon had erected an abrupt and unscalable wall between them.

“I guess I owe you one,” Leon said at last.

“Is that so?”

“When I was infected, what you did then, that was payback for Antarctica. But this time, the books were balanced. You didn’t have to save me.”

“I didn’t have to do any of it,” Wesker said. “I could have walked away when I still had the chance.”

“Wesker…” Leon started to say.

“You don’t owe me anything. I doubt there’s anything I could possibly want from you now.”

Leon sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I’m just a little freaked out right now. I mean, you—“

“I know what I am,” Wesker snapped. “As if the matter were ever in doubt.”

“You’re magnificent.”

That was the last thing he had expected, and it brought Wesker up short. He turned away so that he could contemplate what Leon had said without distraction, but when he looked down he was confronted with the sight of his once-mangled hand, the golden talon that had grown to replace his missing finger. He wondered why it was that his newly blue eyes seemed to see everything with such unsettling clarity.

Leon stepped forward and set a hand on Wesker’s arm. “Are you scared?”

Wesker jerked his head to the side as if to deny that the thought had ever crossed his mind. But there had never been any sense trying to hide something like that from Leon.

“I’m terrified,” he bit out, through clenched teeth.

Leon was quiet. Wesker thought it might be better if he left it at that. The admission was already enough. Saying it seemed to make it real for the first time, and Wesker began to shiver. Leon’s hand was still on his arm, and he supposed he must have felt it.

“There’s something inside me,” Wesker said at last, trying to choose his words carefully but feeling that anything he might come up with would be woefully inadequate. “Something I don’t understand and I never accounted for. Every virus leaves a mark on its host. Even the most innocuous strain of the common cold leaves behind abnormalities in the genetic code. But that is not what is happening to me. Uroborous did not change my body. Somehow, my body changed it.”

“Into what?” Leon said. “I don’t know if I want to think about what comes after Uroborous.”

“I don’t know exactly,” Wesker admitted. “But whatever it is, it healed your wounds at a touch. It brought you back from death.”

Leon frowned as if suddenly remembering. “I was dead?”

“You weren’t dead,” Wesker told him, too quickly for it to sound like anything but a lie. “Your heart had stopped, but only briefly. For less than a minute, really. Any competent emergency physician could have resuscitated you.”

“Not with his blood.”

“No,” Wesker said. “Not like that.”

Leon rubbed his shoulder where Alex had flayed the skin away. “It doesn’t hurt at all anymore,” he said. “It’s like it remembers the pain, but it doesn’t actually hurt. If your blood can do that for me, what else can it do?”

“I have no idea,” Wesker said quietly. “I can’t even begin to contemplate it.”

He tried to pull away, but Leon caught him and wrested him back. “Wesker, wait. Nothing’s changed. If I can deal with you when you’re some kind of agent of unmitigated destruction, I can certainly handle you when you’re the opposite. No one is going to hurt you, and no one is going to take advantage of you while you’re like this. At least not without going through me, for whatever that’s worth.”

It was absurd to imagine that Leon might actually be able to do anything about it, but Wesker thought that he might be comforted all the same. He lowered his eyes in an expression that was a fair approximation of modest gratitude.

“Hey,” Leon said. “Can I see the wings again?”

Wesker had the feeling that this could get out of hand very easily if he let it, but he unfurled his wings for inspection. Leon cracked a smile; his eyes lit up with poorly-concealed delight.

“Jesus, Wesker,” he said, as he trailed the fingers of one hand along the long dagger-like feathers in the middle span of his wing. “You’re really something, you know.”

Wesker glanced away. He was used to praise, accustomed to fear and respect, but when Leon looked at him like that, with such naked adoration, it embarrassed him a little.

Leon had reached up and was stroking one of his curved horns now, fingers tracing all the burnished ridges and creases set into it. Abruptly, his eyes narrowed in amusement. “I bet you’ve got, like, a 24 karat, diamond studded dick.”

“You don’t have to be vulgar,” Wesker said, feeling blood rush to his cheeks.

“Can I see?” Leon said. “For science, I mean.”

“Don’t be absurd.” Wesker considered pulling away, putting an end to this whole ridiculous game in an instant. He tried, but he didn’t quite manage it.

“Come on,” Leon prodded, drawing him back. “Let’s fuck.”

“Now is hardly the most auspicious time for that,” Wesker managed to spit out, distracted, certainly, but still able to keep most of his dignity intact.

All at once, Leon’s expression grew sober, even grave.

“I know,” he said. Wesker could tell that he was making a great effort to maintain his good humor and not quite managing it. “But how many more chances are we really going to get?”

Wesker sighed. Though he didn’t consider Leon a man of any particular intellectual distinction, this time he had to admit that he really had thought of everything. He allowed Leon to pull him back into the shade of one of the big olive trees and to coax him down for a kiss.

He spoke against Wesker’s lips, into his mouth. “Whatever we had we stole. It was only ours for a minute, never to keep.”

“No,” Wesker told him quietly. “We didn’t steal it. It was stolen from us.”

“All right,” Leon relented with a rueful twist of his mouth. “I think so too.”

The hands that tugged at the front of Wesker’s clothing were clumsy with desperation, as was the mouth that met his in an acid kiss. After everything that had happened, it struck Wesker as curious that this was what Leon wanted. He seemed content to leave the trauma of the past few days behind, to bury it in a single impulsive act that would propel them both forward, out of the reach of all he might have suffered.

It was one way to live, Wesker had to admit. He supposed it worked as well as anything people tried.

Leon finished unbuttoning his shirt and pushed it back off his shoulders. Wesker tried to shrug out of it, but it got caught up on his wings and he left it hanging open over his chest. He felt Leon’s nails bite hard into his skin, leaving no mark behind on his flesh. Wesker lowered a hand to fumble at Leon’s belt, tugging it open. Then spreading open his pants and pulling his cock free of the tangle of fabric.

He was hard almost at once, his shaft straining against Wesker’s hand.

“Yeah…” Leon murmured, his teeth scraping against Wesker’s lips. He grabbed him by the hips and pulled him close, grinding their bodies together. Wesker’s body was flooded with familiar heat, liquid fire gliding under his skin, pulse point to pulse point. The last remnants of the Uroborous virus stirred from dormancy, like a figurehead king stripped of its powers of office.

It felt good, so good he could hardly bear it at all.

Wesker sank to his knees at Leon’s feet and Leon clutched ineffectually at his shoulders. “Wait,” he protested. “Stay.” But Wesker acted as if he had not heard. Whatever Leon wanted from him or hoped to accomplish, he surely wouldn’t be complaining for long.

He guided Leon’s cock to his lips and traced a slow half-circle around the head of it with his tongue. Leon’s pulse throbbed insistently beneath his touch, and it was not lost on Wesker how significant that was, his heart beating as it did.

Leon took hold of Wesker’s horns and pulled him forward, all his patience for ritual and romance gone. Wesker moved with him, pitching forward on his knees and relaxing his throat to allow Leon’s cock to slide down it.

It was good like this, he had realized at some point. Not having to talk or explain or justify himself. Not even having to look Leon in the face and act like he had everything just as he wanted it. He could keep his eyes closed the entire time.

Leon came with a gasp, his head fell back against the trunk of the olive tree. Keeping one hand around Wesker’s curved horn and pressing the other back against the bark, he lowered himself to his knees. He angled his legs apart so that they straddled Wesker’s lap, and as soon as he was close enough, he kissed him fiercely.

Wesker didn’t pull away, but he was slow to kiss him back. He had to do so consciously rather than on instinct. He thought he had pulled it off pretty well, but Leon leaned back and looked at him.

“Guess it’s not as much fun when we’re not about to die.” He smiled, like he was trying to crack a joke, and picked up a black feather that had dropped from one of Wesker’s wings. He drew the soft barbs over Wesker’s bare shoulder, around the hollow beneath his collarbone. “Nothing like imminent death to put the kick back into an orgasm, is there?”

“It’s not like that,” Wesker said, looking away. The last thing he wanted to do now was try to explain to Leon what this was like. How it felt like his body had been hijacked from the inside out, maintaining only the most tenuous connection to the sense of self he had once been so sure of. Every touch, every movement Leon made, every new burden on his senses threatened to upset the delicate balance. “Ask me later.”

“Later sounds great,” Leon told him, and to his credit he sounded sincere. Though by now they both knew that there would be no later for them. Leon must have been sure of it, even if he hadn’t yet noticed the sound of an approaching engine that Wesker had been tracking for some time with his newly heightened hearing.

When Leon did hear it, his head jerked towards the sea, where the helicopters were coming from. He got to his feet, arranging his clothing with professional ease, as if he’d been through all this a hundred times before. When he ducked out from under the trees to scan the sky, Wesker was slower to follow him. He straightened up and buttoned his shirt, then he worked the new muscles and tendons in his shoulders, the ones he was just coming to associate with their functions.

After a couple of false starts, his wings folded and the skin on his back parted painlessly to receive them back into his body. A moment later, the golden horns retracted as well. They left no mark or scar on his skin, as if they had never been there at all.

He joined Leon just in time to see a black helicopter come into view. It few in low, buzzing the olive trees so that their tops shook as if caught up in some sudden and invisible storm.

“BSAA,” Leon said. “I figured they’d get here eventually.”

He didn’t exactly seemed thrilled by that, but he glanced back at Wesker. “It might be Chris. Do you want to go say hi?”

Wesker scowled, as if personally offended. “How did they find us?”

“They generally do,” Leon said. “When they get it in their heads to look.”


	28. Chapter 28

The helicopter passed directly over them and touched down near the villa. It didn’t slow or circle back; it wasn’t looking for them, or at least not looking for them where they were.

Leon sighed. The reprieve had been nice, though it hadn’t lasted long; he could not have possibly expected it to. It was all over now and they needed a game plan. Leon was already working on it as he looked back at Wesker and said, “What are they going to do to you if they find you?”

“That depends on a number of variables,” Wesker replied. “Not the least of which is what, exactly, you tell them.”

He sounded pretty well convinced that Leon would go back. That he would submit something to the official record and that any lies he told would be primarily ones of omission; that, regardless of the adventures he’d had and the scrapes he’d been in, he would be home before the streetlights came on, like a good little boy ought to.

Leon could live with that reputation. It was getting a little too late in the game to change it now. Besides, good little boys got away with all kinds of mischief.

“Would you come with me?” Leon said. “They know you’re alive and they’re not going to stop looking. I could help you cut a deal.”

“A deal with the American government?” Wesker seemed faintly and condescendingly amused by the notion.

Leon just shrugged. He didn’t see what was so funny about that.

“They go over the BSAA’s head all the time. To be honest, they might treat you better just to stick it to the non-profit sector.”

“Your employer is as petty as ever, I see.”

“Maybe,” Leon said. “But the benefits aren’t bad. Are you looking to get a 401k started?”

Wesker’s eyes narrowed, barely. It was more of an acknowledgement of the fact that Leon could still crack wise rather than an expression of genuine amusement at what, Leon had to admit, had been a pretty thin joke indeed.

“You know this cannot be,” Wesker said. “I’ve been out in the cold too long.”

“So come in. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“No,” Wesker told him. “But I’m grateful you asked. You make me feel less alone.”

Leon couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out what the problem was. In spite of everything they’d been through, he still harbored a suspicion – and not an unhealthy one by his estimation – of what Wesker would do once he was out of Leon’s sight.

Suspicion was one thing, and fear was entirely another. Leon could work up very little of that when they were together like this. He looked up so he could meet Wesker’s eyes. They seemed tired; Leon could not remember them any other way. Wesker had been exhausted from the moment they met. Not even death had been enough to take the edge off it. That lab in Antarctica, and what had happened there, had taken too much out of him.

All at once, Leon understood. He was ashamed that it had taken him this long.

 “What will they do if they find out about the virus?” he asked, carefully. “I mean, the new one. The one in you now.”

Wesker was silent for a while before he replied. “Make use of it, I suppose. Harvest it, as they would any other valuable and uncommon resource.”

Through strip mining and clear cutting. That much went unsaid, but Leon had it figured out now. He’d been slow on the uptake this time, but he had it now. Wesker couldn’t go back. To Leon, the difference between Umbrella’s sinister machinations and the government’s stalwart protection could not have been starker. But to Wesker, they represented the same implacable truth, the fate he had been trying to escape for the last 20 years.

Leon was aware, painfully so, that it was his turn to speak. He ought to have said something, anything; come up with the words that would have made sense of the past few days. At the very least, he should have tried to smooth things over with something breezy and funny. He thought that most people – maybe even people like Wesker - liked that about him: his ability crack a joke in the face of grim, imminent death.

In the end, Leon was spared having to put on a cheerfully fatalistic face, at least for the moment. There was a commotion down the slope from the olive grove where they were tucked away out of sight: the sound of unstealthy footsteps on the hard-packed Mediterranean soil.

Leon went to the edge of the trees and looked down. He was far more relieved and good deal less surprised than he thought he would be to see Jake Mueller cutting a path through the low scrub.

He was alone, and so Leon felt confident to call out to him. He slid down the steep slope, half-stumbled at the bottom. Jake was there to steady him, but the hand he set on Leon’s shoulder also held him at a distance.

“Hey, kid,” Leon said. “What the hell is going on?”

“Shouldn’t that be my line?” Jake didn’t exactly sound pleased. Leon didn’t want to seem conceited, but he had thought he merited a more enthusiastic welcome than that. Jake’s gaze moved past him, focused on a spot beyond Leon’s shoulder. Leon knew without turning around that Wesker had followed him down the hill.

“All those jarheads started up towards the house,” Jake said in a chilly voice. His face had smoothed out and grown tense at the same time, as if it had gone from a flesh and bone to an ingenious wooden replica of the same. “I knew that you wouldn’t be there. And that if you were, there wouldn’t be anything left of you that I wanted to look at.”

Leon wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to. He got his answer a second later, when Jake thrust him aside and stomped over to look Wesker in the eye. When Jake straightened out and didn’t slouch, they were nearly the same height. He could look his father in the eye without craning his neck the way Leon had to.

“Sherry told me some stuff about you,” he said. “I bet now I know things you didn’t even have a clue about.”

“Very well,” Wesker said. He didn’t seem particularly moved by the announcement, which probably pissed Jake off more than was strictly necessary.

Jake didn’t take the bait, though. He held Wesker’s eyes without flinching or complaining for what seemed a long time, long enough for Leon to begin to feel like he was intruding.

At last, Jake spoke. “You think you’ve got everything figured out, don’t you? You think you’re way ahead of everyone else. But you don’t know shit. Not even about yourself.”

He hesitated a moment, and then reached into his coat, drawing a flashdrive out of an inside pocket. “When I got my hands on this, you know what my first thought was? How much it would hurt you if you knew. Even you.”

Leon stepped forward, setting a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Kid…”

“Don’t!” Jake snapped, jerking away. “I’m talking to my father.”

He thrust the flashdrive in Wesker’s direction. Wesker didn’t reach for it. He stood still, regal, looking down his nose at the drive with brittle disdain.

“Take it,” Jake said harshly. “It’s yours. It’s you. And if anyone is going to be able to make any sense of it…”

“I understand.” Wesker took the drive from him, pinching it carefully between two fingers and extracting it delicately from Jake’s grip so that they never touched each other. “Painful or not, I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’d better,” Jake said quietly. He shook his head. “You need to get the fuck out of here. They’ll be back this way soon. There’s a dock down that way. I saw it on the trip in. Maybe you can find a boat that’ll get you to the mainland.”

“All right,” Wesker replied. He pocketed the drive and pivoted on his heels. With his back turned, Leon could see the jagged holes in his shirt. The skin underneath was unscarred and flawless. He could almost forget the wings had ever been there. They were like some kind of fantastic, feverish dream.

“Mr. Kennedy?” Wesker said quietly. “A moment please.”

“Yeah…” Leon came forward. He was aware of Jake watching him closely, with neither malice nor intrigue. That inscrutable gaze was hot on Leon’s back as he touched Wesker’s arm and drew him away a few steps, where Jake couldn’t hear.

“What did he give you?” Leon asked quietly.

“I don’t know.” Wesker touched the spot over his heart, the breast pocket where he had secured the drive. All at once, he raised his eyes to Leon’s. Their color, once inscrutable and indeterminate, was vibrant and clear now: a bright, blazing blue.

“Will you ask me again?” Wesker said with a quiet intensity. “Ask me again, to go with you.”

Leon took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I won’t.”

Wesker’s brow contracted, as if in pain. “I see.”

He made to turn away again, this time for good, and Leon caught his wrist. “Wait. You do know…”

“I know,” Wesker snapped. He jerked his hand away irritably.

“You do know that I love you?”

Wesker froze, his wrist still trapped in Leon’s grip, arm trailing behind him. Slowly he turned back.

“You do know, don’t you?” Leon said.

“I know,” Wesker replied, very quiet and grave. “But why tell me this now?”

“I was half-hoping if I made it weird enough it would scare you off,” Leon said. He laughed softly. “I probably should have said, I’m starting to maybe fall in love with you. I could. In the future—“

“Quiet,” Wesker said, and he bent and kissed him. Leon’s knees went weak beneath it, and he shifted his grip on Wesker’s wrist when they threatened to fold under him.

Leon broke the kiss, leaning away a fraction of an inch. He pressed his forehead against Wesker’s temple. “You have to go. Wesker, listen, you were right. I have no idea what they’ll really do to you if you come with me.”

“If you think I’m afraid of what they can do…”

 “It doesn’t matter,” Leon said. He stroked Wesker’s hair back, smoothing it away from his forehead. “I don’t want you to have to live like that anymore.”

He might have said more, but it was then that Jake made a loud, exaggerated throat-clearing. Leon and Wesker had moved out of earshot to talk, but they’d certainly given Jake an eyeful. Leon wasn’t embarrassed any more. It had been inevitable.

“Hey, _old guys_ ,” Jake snapped. “I’m trying to do you a favor here.”

Leon glanced back at him. When he turned back, Wesker was watching him with a faint smile and the lines around his eyes smoothed away.

“He’s right,” Leon said.

“This certainly is in the pantheon of long goodbyes.”

“I guess so,” Leon let go of Wesker’s wrist, extricating himself. “I trust you, you know. You’ll do what’s right.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.” Wesker’s hand moved over the front of his clothing in an attempt to brush the dirt off what was already soiled beyond repair. “Goodbye, Leon.”

“I’ll see you,” Leon replied.

He watched Wesker turn and walk away. He hoped until the very end, when he disappeared beyond the olive trees, that he would look back. It was probably for the best that he didn’t, but Leon still felt a little pang of annoyed regret. He shrugged it off quickly, though, and he turned to head back to where Jake was waiting.

“Let’s pack it in.”

“It’s about time,” Jake said. Leon was aware that Jake was watching him differently than he had before. It wasn’t an unkind expression, but Leon was not sure he liked it much. Regardless, he’d been through plenty today, more than enough that he wasn’t going to let Jake’s disapproval or morbid curiosity or anything else bother him too much.

They started back together. Jake was quiet for a while, but as they came in close to the helicopter, he slowed his pace and said, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Leon replied. He was very careful not to look at him. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. His body was moving mechanically, one foot in front of the other. “Fine.”

“You got some blood on you.”

Leon touched the collar of his suit coat. It was stiff all the way down the lapel. “Not mine.”

“Okay, then.” Jake was quiet for another second. Leon sneaked a glance at him and saw that his chin was thrust out defiantly. At least he didn’t look like Wesker like that. Thank god for small miracles.

“Everything else?” Jake said at last, more quietly than before. “That okay, too?”

Leon sighed. “It’s not great, kid. But I’ll live.”

“Sherry’s going to be glad to hear that.” He paused. “She turned up, by the way. Safe and sound.”

“I didn’t doubt it,” Leon said. “But I’m happy to hear.”

“It’s a long story.” Jake shrugged. “She should probably tell you herself.”

They came to the clearing where the helicopter had landed. Leon grabbed Jake’s wrist, holding him up before they got to close. When he tried to speak, he was surprised by the undercurrent of urgency in his voice. It was as if he were waiting for something, desperate for a final message, a last transmission. A way to squeeze a little bit more out of that inconceivable thing that had happened, and then been over before he’d even had a chance to realize what it was.

“Listen, kid,” Leon said roughly. “You gave him something. What did you give him?”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. He looked like he was squinting into the harsh Mediterranean sun. “Something from the past. I don’t know why I did it. He’s going to fuck everything up.”

“No,” Leon said. He reached over and clasped Jake’s arm, though he wasn’t sure which of them it was intended to support. “He’ll do fine.”

“Well, shit. At least none of us are ever going to hurt for work at this rate.”

He hung back a second longer, then shrugged Leon off and started toward the helicopter. Leon let him go ahead. Who could really blame him for not wanting to talk? There was only one possible topic of conversation, and they both wanted to avoid it.

Leon had the distinct feeling he could have avoided it a lot better with a drink in hand, but he didn’t suppose the BSAA stocked rations of whiskey in its MREs.

Hell, maybe it was better this way. He ought to try cutting back.


	29. Chapter 29

It was past midnight when the BSAA finally cleared them to go. Jake wasn’t sure exactly how long he had been up – they’d zigzagged back and forth across a few time zones, and he was not prepared to calculate how many hours had been gained or lost. He only knew that he was exhausted now, that Sherry could barely keep her eyes open. The goddamn BSAA had dragged their feet and delayed their release out of the hope that, in a fog of sleep deprivation, one of them might let something slip about just what the hell had happened back in the Mediterranean.

No one had said as much, naturally, but Jake knew how these things worked. He didn’t even hold it against them. They had just been going through the motions.

Eventually, there had been no more excuses or causes for delay. An unmarked plane had dropped them off in DC. Not at one of the major airports, but on a little regional airstrip to the west of the city. A car – unmarked as well, and with a driver who looked like he knew ten forms of unarmed combat but also knew at least that many methods of being discreet – was waiting for them.

Sherry had held up pretty well under Chris Redfield’s blustering and just-one-more-things, but as soon as she was buckled up and settled in, her head dropped against the back of the seat and she was out like a light. She folded in on herself as she slipped into a deeper sleep, her shoulders bowing forward, her hands settling in her lap. When they passed under a streetlamp, the light coming in through the car window made her eyelashes look gossamer against her cheeks.

Jake wasn’t too proud to admit that he had been looking forward to catching a little shuteye himself, but when he saw Sherry like that it aroused an unexpected protective instinct in him. He needed very little sleep, really, he thought as he watched her. He could stay up a bit longer.

They took the drive in silence. Sherry didn’t move, save for the occasional twitch of her eyes behind the tissue of their lids as she slipped in and out of REM sleep. The sun was coming up by the time the car pulled up across the street from Sherry’s building. People were already out and moving around the streets, beginning their days, going through the motions of their lives. Jake realized that he’d never told the driver where to go, but he had brought them here without so much as a glance at the GPS.

Jake was irritated by the presumption, by the fact that the BSAA probably still had ears on him. He could handle the thought that Chris Redfield had spied on him while he puttered aimlessly around the condo during Sherry’s workday. That he had seen Jake’s porn habits and listened to him piss. What he could not deal with was knowing that someone might be listening even now, to what came next; that he would be privy to Jake’s groping apologies, both of their fumbling attempts to regain equilibrium.

Sherry was still asleep, blissfully unaware or else so far ahead of him that she already had the entire matter settled. Jake couldn’t tell which it was, but neither would have surprised him. When the dome light switched on, she came awake. She stretched, then then her gaze focused on him. She watched him for a long moment, her face a mask, nothing there to indicate what might be on her mind. Without a word, she stepped out into the chilly dawn.

As they crossed the street, Sherry reached out casually and took his arm. She didn’t cling to him. Her hand merely touched the underside of his elbow, where it remained for a moment, a comforting weight, before dropping away again.

Jake glanced at her. He had no idea what she might be thinking.

Back inside, Sherry waited for him while he got the mail. The little box next to the elevator with their unit number on it was stuffed full of bills and coupons accumulated over the days they had been gone. Jake wrapped the former up in a flyer from Burger King just so they’d be out of sight. It wasn’t like he didn’t remember what had gotten them both into this mess: his stubborn need to go chasing after his father’s dirty money, no cleaner now for the fact that the man himself had made a grand gesture of cleaning up his act.

Jake was ashamed of it, now.

They headed upstairs in silence. Jake was glad everything in the condo was in order; it was nice to come home to a clean place after being away for a while. Sherry made a slow circuit of the living room, touching Jake’s scarf where it hung on a hook by the door, trailing her hand over the back of a chair, as if she had been away for years.

Jake hadn’t moved from his spot by the door. He had no idea if he was supposed to say something, do something. If he was even supposed to be here. Someone had swaddled his thoughts in cotton batting, dulling their edges. It seemed utterly pointless to try to make them cut into the issue at hand.

At last, Sherry turned to him. She did it abruptly, about-facing on her heels and fixing him with an unblinking stare.  There was no mistaking that look: she’d made up her mind about something.

“You must be furious at me,” she said. “I’m not sure I can explain, but I can try. Will you let me try?”

Jake felt his forehead crease. There was a long moment when he couldn’t, for the life of him, understand what she was trying to say to him.

It came back to him all at once: Her disappearance, the messages she had left. How he had veered wildly from panic, to depression, to listlessness. Then to anger, yes, but only at himself and his own inadequacies. Only now was he realizing it, but it still wasn’t too late. He had never really been mad at her for leaving.

A strange sound reached Jake’s ears. It took him a moment to realize that it had come from him, and that it was laughter. His head fell back, thumping against the wall.

Sherry didn’t laugh. She didn’t make any sound at all. She stood watching him, rigid and brittle, looking as if she might collapse at any moment, but when she did she would leave an unmoving cast of herself hanging in mid-air where she had standing. A phantom doppelganger, as hard to the touch as if it were carved out of stone.

The abrupt storm of laughter passed as quickly as it had come on. Jake could no longer feel the emotion that had triggered it, but he knew it must have been an intense one. In its absence he felt suddenly calm, empty, somehow comforted.

“I’m not mad,” he said. “Maybe I should be. I think I even could be if I really put my mind to it. But I’m so relieved that I’m not. So let’s just leave it at that.”

“I should have told you everything from the start,” Sherry said. “I don’t even know why I didn’t.”

Jake sighed. “When I woke up and you were gone, I wasn’t even surprised. Everyone leaves, that’s what I thought. And so it was almost a relief to me that you had finally gotten around to leaving too. But then I realized something else. Something was different this time, and I knew, without a doubt, you were going to come back.”

“I couldn’t have stayed gone,” Sherry said. “It is my house.”

When Jake laughed this time, the hysterical edge had gone out of it. It sounded genuine; it felt real. He saw Sherry relax a little at the sound.

“You found what you were looking for,” he said. “So I guess it all worked out.”

“What about you?” Sherry said. “You found something too, didn’t you?”

That brought Jake up short. He felt something like a small, smooth stone turn over inside of him. It seemed he wasn’t quite ready to talk about it yet, but Sherry was looking at him with such tender anticipation that he figured he ought to come up with something.

“I found him.” His voice sounded a little thin to his own ears, a little strained, as if he’d had to force the words out.

Sherry started forward at once, not even pausing to let what he had said sink in. She came towards him, stretching out her hand. “Oh, Jake…”

“Wait,” Jake said. He didn’t draw away from her, but it was only because he consciously stopped himself in time. “Before you get all touchy-feely, you should know something. I let him take that thing you gave me.”

That brought Sherry up short. Her brow furrowed and her hand dropped abruptly back to her side. Once there, it curled into a fist and twisted around a few times. Not angry, or disappointed. Only thoughtful.

“Why?” she said at last.

“I wish I knew,” Jake admitted. He chuckled again. It seemed beyond absurd now. Commedia dell’arte with zombies and tentacles. “He didn’t ask. I made him take it. Just to get back at him, I guess. I’m sorry.”

She was quiet for a long time. At least, it seemed that way to Jake. It might as well have been an eternity.

“I worked hard for that,” she said at last, quietly. “I almost died. It wasn’t yours to give away, to him or anyone else.”

“I know,” Jake said. “I’m sorry. I mean it. I’m a fuck up—“

“Quiet,” she told him sharply. “I’m not going to get mad at you just because you want me to. I’m not going to hate you just because you think that’s the way things should be. If you gave it to him, you had your reasons. If you wanted him to have it, it’s because he was the right person to take it.”

“For a second, it seemed like it,” Jake said. “But it was only a second.”

Sherry didn’t say anything. She wasn’t buying it, and Jake had to admit that it was a pretty unconvincing lie. He hadn’t even managed to fool himself with it, not for long at least.

“Fine,” he said at last, through gritted teeth. “I did it to impress him. I did it so he’d remember who I was. Is that what you want to hear?”

“It’s a little better,” Sherry admitted.

“I thought it was worse.”

Sherry sighed. “At least it’s going to be safe with him. That’s all I care about right now. Let’s fight later, after I’ve had eight hours to sleep on it.”

Jake knew that was probably the best he was going to get. It was more than he had hoped for, that was for certain.

“Take as much time as you need, babe,” he said. “I’m just glad you’re back.”

“I know you are.” Sherry watched him steadily. “I’ll come to bed in a few minutes. I need to get cleaned up first. I’ve been able to smell myself since somewhere over the Atlantic.”

“I didn’t notice,” Jake said. “Honest.”

“You’re sweet. Don’t stay up too long, all right?”

“Just a few minutes,” Jake said, and he watched her move back down the hallway. After a moment, he heard the shower come on, and at last he allowed himself to relax.

Maybe everything would go back to the way it had been. Sherry could return to work, Jake to finding ways to fill his days. It no longer seemed like something to be endured.

He would be able to live like that. He’d seen the alternative.

Jake didn’t want to give his father the credit, but he did think finally meeting the man had something to do with it. Wesker had no one, and for all his refined affectations it had shown from the first. There had been something of the rusty and disused about him, like a voice that had become unaccustomed to human speech.

It hadn’t been so long since Jake had thought that there were very few things that were worth doing if you couldn’t do them alone. But he’d seen now just where that kind of thinking got you. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, then, to have Sherry around. She curbed his worst instincts.

He’d have to make it sound a little better than that when he explained it all to her. It would have to be romantic.  No, not romantic exactly. Sherry didn’t go in for grand gestures, even if they weren’t entirely empty. Big emotional speeches didn’t impress her, not the way hard, measurable facts did.

She expected results, and delivering results was exactly what Jake did. It wasn’t exactly a love affair for the ages, but, hell, it worked for them. And as far as Jake was concerned, that was good enough.

He was determined now to fight for them - for whatever it was that they’d had and could have again - but Jake didn’t think this was the ideal time. He wasn’t sure if he should follow Sherry back to the bedroom or give her space for now. In the end, he decided he should probably at least look in on her, make sure she didn’t need anything.

The bedroom was dark when he peeked around the doorframe, and Sherry was under the covers. Jake started to withdraw, but then he heard her voice, very clear and wide awake.

“Come here a second.”

“Yeah, babe?” Jake came inside a step.

“Don’t creep around like that. I’ll never get any sleep that way.” Her hand emerged from beneath the sheet and she stroked Jake’s side of the bed. “Come lay down.”

Jake stripped off his shirt and dropped it in the hamper. He got into bed without touching her, as far over on his side as he could without falling out and onto the floor. His fingers curled at his sides, clawing the sheets up into ridges.

“Honestly…” Sherry sighed. She turned over on her side so that she was up against him. “I told you, I’m not mad. But I’m going to be if you keep acting like that.”

Jake slipped an arm around her, pulling her close. “All right. I’m sorry. Let’s just say what we mean from now on, okay?”

“Sounds good,” Sherry replied. “You start.”

“I love you,” Jake said, without even thinking about it.

Sherry’s hand rested against his arm; he felt her fingers curl with pleasure. “That’s a good start,” she said quietly. She was quiet for a moment, then she added, “You know, when I was out there, I thought I might die…”

“Babe.” Jake sighed. “I should have been there.”

“No,” Sherry replied. “That’s not what I meant. I only wanted to tell you… it was worth it.”

“You mean, that thing I lost?” Jake said. Not lost, though. Given away, as if it were his to give.

Sherry shook her head. “That was good, I have to admit. I did a pretty good job back there. But that wasn’t what I meant.”

“You did a good job with the BSAA, too,” Jake said. “I meant to tell you that. You’ve been killing it lately, babe.”

She stroked her palm over his chest, tracing the hollow under his collarbone with her fingertips. “I like to hear you say that. Maybe even more than when you say you love me.”

“They’re both true,” Jake told her. He reached for her hand, captured it and pinned it against his chest.

Sherry was quiet for a while. Jake had begun to wonder if she had dropped off to sleep, but then she spoke again.

“If they made a cure, would you take it?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “I never thought about it. I never had any symptoms. Would you want me to?”

“Yes…”she said. It was barely a whisper.

Jake scowled up at the ceiling. Sherry had a lot more on her mind than the dry and perfunctory business of vaccination. This time, though, it didn’t seem like a matter of secrets; it was just his fault for not getting it.

“Then of course I would,” he said. “I’d do it for you. I mean, it’s not a big deal, right? Why make a huge thing of it.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Sherry replied. She seemed relieved.  “Thanks, Jake. You make me feel so much better.”

Her cheek was pressed up against his arm, and he felt her lips curl into a smile. Then she kicked his leg playfully under the blankets and draped her arm around him.

“You know what people like to do after they almost die?”

Jake turned to look at her. He could only see the top of her head from his vantage point, but he had the feeling her smile had turned mischievous. This was a surprise, but definitely one he could live with.

“Go to church?”

“Something like that.”

She swung her leg over him and straightened up so that she was sitting across his hips. Jake’s cock twitched in his jeans. He’d been feeling sluggish and off-balance since they got home, and it was good to see that at least one part of him wasn’t slow to get the message.

He set a hand on Sherry’s waist to steady her. “I thought you were tired.”

“I’m so tired I don’t remember what it’s like to feel awake.”  She raked the fingers of one hand back through her hair, pushing it out of her face, as she bent over him to demand a kiss. “But if I fall asleep now I’ll miss all the fun.”

As she straightened up again, she hooked her hands under the hem of her tee-shirt and stripped it off over her head. She winged it towards the hamper with a flick of her wrist, a movement Jake saw only out of the corner of his eye. He was focused instead on the inclination of her chin, the twisting of her waist, the upward curve of her breasts. It was as if he were seeing it all or the first time.

Slowly, a blush crept over her cheeks. “Quit it. You make me embarrassed when you watch me like that.”

“Sorry, babe,” Jake said.

He tightened his grip on her waist, lifting her up so he could turn her over onto her back. Sherry laughed and slapped his shoulder. “Not fair. I don’t pick you up, do I?”

“You should some time.”

Sherry grabbed him around the neck and jerked him down into a kiss, mashing the last word into an unintelligible grunt against her lips. No use arguing with that. Jake reached down between them and slid her pajamas off. She worked them free of her legs and kicked them aside. Then he kneeled up, just long enough to shuck off his jeans before she pulled him back down.

She tensed beneath him, her hips arching off the mattress pressing up against his with such sudden urgency that Jake thought at first she meant to throw him off.

But she relaxed again almost at once, her knees easing apart so he could settle between them.

Jake wondered if it ought to have felt more profound. Sherry had almost died. Though he didn’t know the details exactly, he knew that she wouldn’t have exaggerated something like that. It must have been pretty touch and go in there, at least for a little while. So maybe this ought to have been more significant for both of them; maybe he should have been seeing stars.

And yet, it wasn’t any different from the sex they’d had dozens of times before. Nothing wrong with that, not by a long shot, save that it didn’t kindle that fire inside him, the one that always blazed hottest when emotions were high and death was close.

Those days were behind him now. He felt a vague, nostalgic longing for them, but he was a big boy. He’d get over it.

Jake had never thought he’d be the settling down type. When he tried to conceive of himself as happily cohabitating in Sherry’s condo – cooking, cleaning, staying busy the best he could – it was still not his own face he saw. There was a slight disconnect between the way he perceived himself and the reality of his situation, like a glitch in video. But the two versions of himself were becoming easier to reconcile.

Once, maybe, he would have jealously guarded his self-image. A stubborn and calcified sense of self, and a willingness to defend it even unto violence, that was all right for a mercenary, but you couldn’t take it to the bank.

He’d seen it now, what happened when you tried to live on solipsism like it was food or oxygen.

He and Sherry were a little slow to fall back into rhythm with each other, but once they had Jake remembered why he’d missed it. Sex with Sherry had always been good, as good now as it had been the first time they had fumbled their way through it, if not even better.

Afterwards, Sherry cleaned them up conscientiously, then turned over and fell asleep. Jake stayed up a little longer, glancing over at her from time to time. It seemed to him that she was smiling faintly, though he couldn’t say for sure, and Jake briefly congratulated himself on still being able to screw his girlfriend into a coma, even after spending a dozen hours squeezed into a small seat on a trans-Atlantic flight.

But the truth was probably that she was tired, and she felt that talking to him more now wouldn’t solve anything and in fact might walk back all the good their reunion had done.

The truth was never quite as grand as grand as what you imagined. Jake still wasn’t in love with the idea, but he was beginning to think he could live with it.


	30. Epilogue

 

When Leon got back from grocery shopping on a cold, bright afternoon in late April, he found the door to his apartment unlatched and ajar. It was inconceivable that he might have forgotten to lock it on the way out, and no one else had the key.

It didn’t look good, Leon had to admit. It didn’t look like anything he was going to want to deal with, especially on a day when his shopping bags were conspicuously missing the added weight of a couple of whiskey bottles. But no matter how long he stared, dumbfounded, at the gap that had formed between the door and the frame, Leon could not feel any apprehension.

His instincts were still good, and they generally let him know when things were about to go south, but they weren’t telling him anything now. Either there really was a perfectly reasonable explanation, one that Leon would be laughing about in a few minutes, or he’d finally gotten around to losing his edge completely.

Whatever the case, the cold stuff was already starting to thaw. Leon shifted the pair of plastic bags in his right hand to the left, then he nudged the door open with his boot.

The living room looked the same. He had half expected it to be ransacked - the couch cushions sliced open and all the drawers emptied out on the floor – though he didn’t know why. He didn’t have anything anyone would want, unless they wanted his life.

A soft sound from the kitchen caught his attention. It was a single muted click, a stealthy footfall on the tile. Ada Wong appeared in the doorway, looking domestic in a slim red pencil skirt and a black cardigan.

“Long time no see,” she said. Her smile, when it came, was controlled, measured, but genuine enough. “I was wondering when you’d get back.”

Leon felt himself relax, which struck him as strange considering what he knew of Ada and of what usually happened when the two of them got together. That was fine with him; his arms were starting to get pretty tired.

Keeping one eye on Ada, he shuffled the plastic bags over to the kitchen table and set them down. “You still remember how to make an entrance.”

“I knew it,” Ada said. “I should have called. But I was in the neighborhood.”

Leon turned to look at her, hoping her face would trigger something inside of him, give him some clue as to what he was supposed to be feeling. It didn’t. He was not flooded with a new sense of purpose and passion. Nothing made any more sense now than it had five minutes ago, or yesterday, or the day before, or in the six months that had passed in a nauseous blur since what had happened in Greece.

“Do you want a drink?” Leon said abruptly.

“Could I trouble you?” Ada was watching him curiously. He was, perhaps, not what she had expected to find after all this time. “I would have helped myself, but I couldn’t find where you keep the liquor.”

“I’m trying to cut back,” Leon said. “All I’ve got is beer. Is that all right?”

“A beer sounds perfect,” Ada purred. “It’s friendlier than a cocktail, don’t you think? More familiar.”

Leon fetched a couple of bottles from the fridge. He’d whittled himself down to just a couple of six-packs a week, which actually hadn’t been as tough as he’d thought it was going to be, even with basically nothing to do during the day but think. All the same, Ada was lucky she’d shown up on a Wednesday when the selection was still decent.

He popped off the caps and carried them out to the living room. Ada was in repose on the sofa, and Leon half-handed the bottle to her before he thought better of it. “Do you want a glass?”

“This is fine,” Ada said with one of her carefully measured out smiles. She took the beer and sipped it delicately. “Have a seat, handsome. Let me look at you.”

She’d left him room on the sofa, but Leon took the chair facing her. “Ada, don’t take this the wrong way…”

“You want to know why I’m here,” Ada finished for him. “I understand. Whenever we get together like this, trouble is always the third wheel.”

She fixed him with an unreadable stare, her eyes half-hidden behind sleepy lids. “Why do you think I’m here?”

Leon held her gaze. He remembered a time when a look like that would have really knocked him for a loop. He’d been plenty stupid back then, and he wished he could be stupid again. He wished he could just find his way back to being an innocent idiot full of notions.

He didn’t say any of that to Ada, though. For all he really knew about her, she might be thinking the exact same thing. Instead, he just forced himself to laugh. It was a big, breathless sound, and not particularly convincing.

“You have a message for me,” he said. It was a stab in the dark, a blind guess.

“Who would I have a message from?” she replied.

Leon hesitated. This time he couldn’t make himself laugh. “Someone we both know?”

Ada frowned slightly, and quickly hid the expression behind her bottle of beer. Not fast enough, though. Leon had seen the look that passed across her face just then. It had been pity.

“Believe it or not, I have better things to do that pass notes for you,” she said. Whatever she had been thinking, whatever she thought she might have known, she had shelved it for the moment. Her voice was once again an inscrutable purr, her expression a mask, her manner impenetrable. “In fact, I came because I wanted to. Because I missed you.”

“Really?” Leon said. He did not sound like he believed it.

“A bit,” Ada replied with a shrug. “It’s been so dreadfully quiet lately. I got to thinking what you must be like when you’re not out playing cops and robbers, and I realized I couldn’t imagine it. So I came to see for myself.”

“What do you think?” Bottle in hand, Leon gestured vaguely at his surroundings.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect, but somehow it isn’t what I expected at all.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Leon said.

Ada shook her head, brushing the remark off as if it annoyed her. “That wasn’t what I meant. I’m really dreadful at small talk. I used to be quite the charmer, but I’m afraid that is a muscle that has atrophied from disuse. Shall I cut to the chase?”

“It depends,” Leon said. “Are you here because you need something killed?”

“I’m here about T-Odysseus,” Ada said.

“I heard about that,” Leon replied. He took a sip of beer; he throat was suddenly so dry that it ached. He had been trying to avoid gossip, but some things were impossible to miss. There had been talk for months now, of a vaccine that was in production. They said it attacked the T-virus protein, that it gave the recipient total immunity to all existing strains. They said a lot of crazy things.

Ada went on. “I have a contact who tells me that they’re pushing distribution through. Sending it all over the world. They’re going to wipe it out, like smallpox.”

“Look, Ada, it’s not that I don’t like seeing you, but don’t you have anyone else you can discuss this with? A book club or something? Why come to me?”

“I came to you because my first thought when I heard that wasn’t relief. It was dread, of a world that isn’t always on the verge of ending. That doesn’t need bad girls or Boy Scouts. Where do I fit in a world like that? I thought you, of all people, might understand. Better than a book club, at least.”

Leon didn’t say anything. He kept turning it over in her mind. He’d never heard her sound so fatalistic, so final, not even in Raccoon City, in Lianshang, when things really had looked their bleakest. It had taken something like this – a potential end to the T-virus and the unwinnable, unending war it had brought with it – to get her to really contemplate her own mortality.

Leon did have to admit he understood where she was coming from.

When he didn’t reply, Ada pressed on. “You know I didn’t have anything to do with it, right?” she said. “Raccoon City, I mean. I was there, but I never wanted anything like that.”

She didn’t sound like she was asking forgiveness, or even like she wanted him to absolve her. It was just a bit of business to clear up before they could move on.

“Sure,” Leon told her. “I always knew that. And you always knew that I knew.”

“He never wanted that, either.”

This time, Leon didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to think. Over the past few months, he’d almost managed to convince himself that what had happened with Wesker had been temporary insanity, hypnosis, zombie sex pollen. The details didn’t matter. What mattered was that it had been an aberration, something he should never and would never have done if he’d been in his right mind. It had been pretty touch and go for a while, but he’d almost gotten himself convinced of it, and that was really for the best.

One thing he had never needed to remind himself was that he didn’t want anyone to know the details, least of all Ada Wong. If he’d ever been sure of one thing, it was that she didn’t need to hear about the tenuous, stumbling agony of those days.

But she was here now, telling him that she had understood everything all along, and he felt nothing but relief.

“I guess you knew him pretty well,” Leon managed at last.

Ada shrugged. “I worked for him for a long time, but he kept his secrets. I wouldn’t say I knew him that well. For a man like that, intensity matters more than duration when it comes to relationships.”

Leon’s suspicions must have registered clearly on his face, because Ada laughed abruptly. “Are you concerned for my honor? Or his? Let me set your mind at ease: nothing ever happened. We were strictly professional. Besides, I prefer the all-American type to the Ubermensch.”

“I wasn’t going to ask about that,” Leon muttered. He felt his face getting hot.

“Ever the gentleman,” Ada said vaguely. Her expression grew vague as well, for a moment, as if she had just remembered something important. “Do you like surprises, Leon?”

“I hate them.”

“Then I’ll spoil this one for you,” Ada said. “The BSAA has taken over distribution of the T-Odysseus vaccine, which means they can sidestep a lot of government regulation. They’re going to try to get it out all in one push, the idea is that they establish herd immunity before the next outbreak.”

“How do you know all this?” Leon asked. He had his sources, and he’d been paying more attention to the vaccine than he wanted to admit, but nothing about the BSAA’s involvement had trickled down to him.

“I still have friends in high places,” Ada told him. “And I cultivate them very well. But that’s all I know for sure. There’s more I can guess at, though. For example, whoever is behind the vaccine must have still had some strings left to pull with the BSAA. And he must be awfully publicity-shy. No one seems to be able to get a handle on who actually synthesized the compound.”

Leon’s thumb scraped over the label on his bottle, fraying the edge. He knew that it looked like a nervous affectation. “Whoever it was, he might have bothered to ask the rest of us what we think about it.”

“I’m sure he’s got everything worked out just how he wants it,” Ada said. “He does know a thing or two.”

“He doesn’t know as much as he thinks.” Leon realized he sounded bitter, though he didn’t feel it. He stood up abruptly, and motioned to Ada’s bottle. “Want another?”

“If you’re offering.”

There was still a good three inches in the bottom of his own beer, but it was as good an excuse as any to get out from under her probing eyes. Leon headed for the kitchen.

Wesker was still out there somewhere. He’d retreated back in the shadows where he’d always felt at home, but now, instead of threatening them with destruction, he menaced them with peace. Leon had expected a grand gesture eventually, but he hadn’t thought Wesker would go crawling back to the BSAA.

There was the matter of the other Wesker, too. They hadn’t found her. Leon had expected her body to wash up on the mainland eventually, but it never had. Alex had vanished as silently and unfussily as her brother had, though Leon had the impression that there was at least one person who knew right where she was.

He could see what was happening: Wesker was retracing his steps, cleaning up messes, patching up old wounds. He worked steadily, systematically, because he didn’t know any other way. And he never doubted for a moment that he would find all just as he had left it, waiting for his hand to set it in order.

Leon wondered if he qualified as a mistake now, if he was now just another repair to be made, a dropped stitch to be picked up. He supposed that, if he was, Wesker would get around to him eventually. And he also supposed that he would be waiting when it happened. His pride didn’t suffer much for the realization, but neither did his sense of hope. In truth, he expected very little and he preferred it that way.

It was time for a change, and he knew he wouldn’t get another opportunity as good as this one.  Tomorrow, the next day, sometime very soon, news about the vaccine would break. It was called T-Odysseus, and Leon suspected that Wesker had been adamant on that point. It was a romantic gesture flung in the face of the world, an acknowledgement that this new world had been two decades in the making. For Wesker knew as well as anyone and better than most that there could be no cure without a long and humbling convalescence.

For a moment, Leon could see the world as Wesker might have, more than twenty years ago when he had begun work on the T-virus. He must have been drawn at once to the sub-microscopic world, the last frontier that mankind had yet to conquer. A stage set and dressed for the performance of some grand and beautiful dream.

The dream had not come to pass as he had planned it, but the dream might come and go, might change in shape and mutate into strange and unthinkable forms.

Wesker had gotten what he wanted in the end; he’d left an indelible mark on the world. Now all that remained was to go back and unmake all that he had created. Leon wondered if Wesker considered it a victory, or an absolute and crushing defeat. He couldn’t say for sure; he really knew very little of the man.

All he really knew was that in the end Wesker had come through. He’d done the right thing. It didn’t really matter whether he had done it for himself, or because Leon had asked him to. Hell, he might even have done it just because it was right.

Leon would ask him some day. And he wouldn’t let him off the hook until he got a straight answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it. It's finally finished. Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. You guys are really great. I'm genuinely grateful for all the kind, encouraging, thoughtful comments I've gotten. I hope we meet again soon.


End file.
